On Cousin Phillis
I wonder why it is that we always talk about ‘Mrs Gaskell’ (and not, say, Miss Brontë or Mr Dickens). Is it to trivialise her, or to call attention to the qualities of a nineteenth-century woman who maintained 1) a literary career and 2) an entire husband? Perhaps we formalise Gaskell’s femaleness precisely because her interest in the industrial revolution, in the condition of the poor, in public life, was so prescient, so panoramic, so - well... masculine - that her femaleness must be introduced as a foil, perhaps to take her less seriously. Yeah, she wrote about strikes and factories and important shit, but she was still a girl.
Well, she liked a dichotomy, did Mrs Gaskell. I wonder if she read Hegel (if so, not very girly). North and South, urban and pastoral, Mothers and Daughters. Cousin Phillis, which I had never heard of before a mention in Helen Lewis’ Substack, contains multiple dichotomies: urban and rural, innocent and worldly, rooted and cosmopolitan. It seems to share more DNA with Daisy Miller than the usual doorstep mid-Victorian novel; certainly it shares form at circa ninety pages.
The story is of Paul Manning, the son of an upwardly-mobile engineer, who forms a close bond with a family outcropping in the countryside: the unorthodox pastor-farmer father, the intelligent yet uneducated mother, and the beautiful, scholarly and unspoilt Cousin Phillis. We expect Paul and Phillis to fall in love; they don’t. Phillis is enamoured with Holdsworth, Paul’s youthful and glamourous boss (he has an Italian-style moustache and he knows about Dante and trains: signifiers of the Victorian fuckboy). Holdsworth lets Phillis down, not because he’s particularly wicked or ill-intentioned, but because he’s a bit flippant and not used to sincerity. Paul makes it worse, also not because he’s particularly wicked or ill-intentioned, but because he’s a people-pleaser who hasn’t yet worked out what sort of man he wants to be.
Because that’s what this novella is about - men, who get to decide what sort of man they want to be from a roster of options, and women, who whittle themselves down precisely because for them there are no options. There’s a dichotomy worthy of a Victorian novella, worthy of a society in the midst of seismic change. Worthy, indeed, of Mrs Gaskell.
