Mrs Gaskell & Me by Nell Stevens

I love a book about reading, and I love a biography where the biographer’s experience is part of the story. And so I was really pleased when Picador sent me a review copy of Nell Stevens’ new book Mrs Gaskell & Me. I’d heard of her book Bleaker House but not read it yet – still, this sounded so up my street that I couldn’t resist starting it almost immediately, Century of Books be hanged.

The book is in two parallel timelines. In one timeline, Elizabeth Gaskell has written a controversial biography of her friend Charlotte Bronte, and is heading off to Rome at the time of publication. In the other timeline, Nell Stevens is writing her PhD thesis about Gaskell. Both of them have romantic entanglements of some variety – Gaskell is charmed by the, indeed, charming Charles Eliot Norton; Stevens gets up the courage to tell her friend Max that she’s in love with him, and they start a slightly complex, often long-distance relationship. The parallels are clearly brought to the fore, but they are there nonetheless.

I deliberately didn’t look up anything about Gaskell’s life, because I didn’t want to know how much was documented and how much Stevens imagined. Much like ‘Nell Stevens’ herself in this book, it is a fictionalised version – or, rather, a selective and edited version. Every biography or autobiography is that, naturally, but I suspect Stevens had to edit a little more than most to make parts cohere.

While she writes well about Gaskell’s adventures, and imaginatively makes us feel like we are watching these tense moments of her life, I have to admit that I was drawn a lot more to the sections about Stevens’ own life. Perhaps any dual narrative will inevitably lead us enjoying one more than the other – I do find, in a novel, that the balance is more easily struck with three. In the strand that follows Stevens’ life, she writes with striking vividness about her romance – sometimes awkward, sometimes secure, sometimes fraught – and juggling it alongside writing her PhD thesis. Normally I find fiction or non-fiction about romance a bit tedious (unless it’s a romcom movie, then I’m right in) – but Stevens manages to write about her emotional experiences without being too vague or claiming too much worldwide significance for them – the two pitfalls people often fall into. By contrast, when she writes about Gaskell’s emotional life, the guesswork shows through. It’s all quite plausible, but inevitably loses some of the vitality that makes her sections so engaging. (I did like what she wrote about the reception to Gaskell’s life of Charlotte Bronte, though – I hadn’t known it was such a scandal.)

And then there is all that she writes about the academic student life. Perhaps I enjoyed this mostly because it reminds me my own doctorate, and the highs and lows of academic research – dealing with expectations, wondering about the future, revelling in the highs when research unearths gems, and panicking because nothing seems to cohere. Though Stevens’ course had a lot of expectations – she seemed to have substantial work and a strong idea of where she was going almost immediately. I didn’t really know where my thesis was going for at least 18 months.

The main divider in whether or not you’ll enjoy this is: do you like the fourth wall broken? This is all meta – all about the author, and doing the research, and breaking that wall. I love it and, if anything, would have welcomed more. The Gaskell bits held my attention, but it was the “and me” that made me really love this book. And, indeed, I’d bought a copy of Bleaker House before I got to the end.