1 post tagged “mary barton”
Note: There might be some spoilers here. We'll see.
After reading -- and absolutely loving and devouring -- Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters through DailyLit.com, I thought that I'd tackle another Gaskell book, Mary Barton.
A brief overview from Amazon: While Mary Barton is literally a murder mystery, it is also an abundantly detailed and sympathetic view of the nineteenth-century English weaving village of Manchester and some of its people. Mary Barton is young, kind, and beautiful -- perhaps dangerously so. John Barton, her hearty and intelligent but grievously uneducated father who "could never abide the gentlefolk," pours fierce love and courage into his family and work. Mary's love -- for her father, her friends, her charming rich suitor (the son of a factory owner), and his rival, her faithful childhood friend Jem who "loves her above life itself" -- provides rich texture and suspense in this finely spun tale: will Mary's pride be her ruin? Will Jem pay with his life for his love of Mary? Interspersed with sparse but regular authorial observation, scenes from family life, work, and love in a nineteenth-century industrial village come alive.
My friend Hillary originally recommended Mary Barton to me a while ago and said, "yeah, try counting how many people die."
I stopped counting after a while. A lot of people die. But one of Gaskell's main themes is the vast difference between the working class and the wealthy, and how so many people died deplorable, painful deaths from starvation in 1840's Manchester because of that divide. There is a very strong (heck, let's call it preachy) Christian/moral theme to this book, especially toward the end, about witnessing the suffering of another man and doing nothing to relieve it. One's inhumanity toward another is inexcusable in Gaskell's eyes (as it should be in everyone's eyes, don't you think?).
On the other hand, there is the love/murderous triangle between Mary, Mr. Carson, and Jem, which is excellently portrayed, with intrigue, suspicion, and red herrings. The relationships in the book outside this love triangle are even better -- Mary and her father, Margaret and Will, Job and everyone, Alice and everyone, Jem and his mother, etc. These relationships are all so rich and well-developed.
The plot is depressing, exciting, boring, sobering, and loving, all in one. Hillary particularly liked the middle of the novel where Mary Baron plays detective. I must agree, and add that the boat chase was fantastic. Mary Barton would translate to film really well, I feel. Come on, Andrew Davies! Tackle it!
My Rating: 7 out of 10, for being in stark contrast to the fluttering world of Wives and Daughters. But it definitely showed Gaskell's range as a writer. Some of the parts about labor unions bogged the story down a bit, but all in all I'd definitely recommend this one.
