SOURCE: "Elizabeth Gaskell: The Telling of Feminine Tales," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall, 1984, pp. 274-87.

In the following essay, Weiss maintains that the short tales within Gaskell's larger fiction work out "the anxieties and ambiguities inherent in the role of the female artist."

In considering the works of Elizabeth Gaskell, the critic is immediately confronted with those twin damning adjectives, "charming" and "minor," which have clung to the reputation of Gaskell in the present century and prevented a balanced and serious consideration of her works. Discussions of her talent usually suggest her marginal status, protraying her as a homemaker and an amateur, rather than as a serious professional writer. And no quality has been held against the author more than her natural gift of storytelling. Her love of plot-making, her appreciation of the good anecdote, story, or melodrama has been cited against her, as if...