From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen
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. When Mary's beautiful Aunt Esther disappears, her beauty is blamed: "Not but what beauty is a sad snare. Here was Esther so puffed up, that there was no holding her in." 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. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.
Mary Barton FROM THE PUBLISHER
About the Author
Gaskell was born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson on September 29, 1810. Her family lived in Chelsea (now Cheyne Walk.) After her mother died when Gaskell was still a toddler, her father, William, took her to North England to stay with an aunt. He remarried, and didnﾽt see her again until she was twelve years old, causing her to feel abandoned. At twenty, she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister like her father, and moved to 1 Dover Street, Manchester. She had four daughters, and worked as a pastorﾽs wife among the young girls who labored long hours in the cityﾽs cotton mills. A frequent traveler, the nature of her foreign correspondence reveals that she was a private person ﾽ she wanted the letters burned ﾽ who was more industrious and organized than passionate.
SYNOPSIS
Mary Barton is a novel with an author, genre, plot and conclusion marked by tension, opposition and conflict. It exists on the event horizon between the British industrial and agricultural economies, between Tory Anglicanism and the non-conformist Whigs, between employers and works and, finally, between women and men. The original title was to have been ﾽJohn Barton,ﾽ but was changed later to its present form. Yet, critics reading it today find its narrative to fall, as did the original publication, into two ﾽbooks,ﾽ with the first following the descent of John Barton and the other the ascendancy of his daughter, Mary.
The first half follows Johnﾽs union activities and the industrial upheavals of 1840s Manchester. Its strong sympathies for the labor class, use of their crude language and description of their nauseating living conditions caused many to criticize the novel, despite Charles Dickensﾽ praise.
The second half of the novel exposes the conflicting Victorian ideals of womanhood. Through the characters of Esther Barton, a prostitute, and Mary Barton, a vain and naﾽve girl who transforms into a capable woman, Gaskell sets up a framework for feminism. Though on the surface an English Provincial novel in the fashion of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, Mary Barton rewards multiple readings by revealing webs of inner conflict that both affirm convention and whisper rebellion.
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