SOURCE: "Gaskell's Ghosts: Truths in Disguise," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 21, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 27-40.

In the following essay, Martin discusses the role of the supernatural in Gaskell's novels and shorter works.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" someone is supposed to have asked Madame du Deffand, to which she replied, "No . . . but I am afraid of them."¹

If that question had been posed to Elizabeth Gaskell a hundred years later, she might have responded similarly: "No, but I write stories about them, I tell tales of them by my friends' firesides, and I have seen them." For Gaskell, not unlike Madame du Deffand and many others before and since, is ambivalent—admittedly superstitious and yet a woman of great common sense and considerable knowledge. A cousin of Charles Darwin and a devout Unitarian, in the mid-century crisis of faith she repudiated neither science nor belief and combined...