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Heaven 2023: January Book Group Cousin Phillis by Elizabeth Gaskell

SarasaSarasa All Saints Host
edited January 8 in Limbo
Kicking off the year is this short novel by Elizabeth Gaskell. An interesting read for lots of reasons. The changes in Victorian society due to industrialisation, the role of women at the time, non-conformist religion in the era to name a few. It should be easy to get hold of it is often in a volume with the much more well known Cranford.

Cousin Phillis

As usual I'll post some questions on the 20th.

Comments

  • MiliMili Shipmate
    This one was only 170 pages so I have read it already. It's a simple story, but lots of interesting historical stuff to discuss!
  • CaissaCaissa Shipmate
    Just requested a copy from our university library system.
  • SarasaSarasa All Saints Host
    Phew I'm glad a few of us will be discussing the book. It is one of my favourites and as @Mili said there is lots of discuss.
  • SarasaSarasa All Saints Host
    Just flagging this up in case anyone missed it and would like to join in.
  • TrudyTrudy Heaven Host
    Just realized my library has it so I will give it a shot.
  • CaissaCaissa Shipmate
    I have 50 pages to go.
  • CaissaCaissa Shipmate
    Finished it last night.
  • SarasaSarasa All Saints Host
    I'm just having a re-read ahead of posting some questions, which I'll post sometime on Friday.
  • TrudyTrudy Heaven Host
    Just started last night and enjoying it so far.
  • SarasaSarasa All Saints Host
    edited January 2023
    It's the 20th so a few very general questions on Cousin Phillis to get us started

    1. Did you enjoy it?

    2. Do you think Gaskell intends to portray Holman's farm as a sort of Eden? If so is Holdsworth the serpent, or is it the creeping industrialisation of the area?

    3. Did you find the characters believable? Are there really pastors like Holman in the world?

    4. This short novel was intended to be in eight parts, but Gaskell only wrote six. What do you think happened next?

    5. Anything else you'd like to discuss?
  • MiliMili Shipmate
    Thanks Sarasa

    1. Did you enjoy it?

    I enjoyed it as a short, pleasant, historical read. I would have rather they hadn't 'spoilt' Paul Manning's future love life. It seemed he married to cement business relationships between his family and his wife's, but had genuine affection for her.

    2. Do you think Gaskell intends to portray Holman's farm as a sort of Eden? If so is Holdsworth the serpent, or is it the creeping industrialisation of the area?

    I didn't get that impression, but that may be seeing it through modern eyes. The Holman family were tight knit and their farm was successful, however they had many trials before Holdsworth or industrialisation came along. They lost all their children (or at least their son) except Phillis in childhood, Holman had to deal with judgemental fellow ministers and they sometimes had issues with farm workers, Mrs. Holman had to deal with migraines in hot weather. Their lives had many positives, but struggles as well. It seemed the parents struggled with the idea of Phillis growing up and may have found it difficult if she married and moved away, especially if she emigrated, which could still happen without Holdsworth on the scene.

    3. Did you find the characters believable? Are there really pastors like Holman in the world?

    The characters seemed pretty believable. Phillis' brain fever was a bit dramatic, but heartbreak can be tough at that age, especially if she had assumed marriage was almost certain with Holdsworth.

    I don't think many pastors these days are full time farmers on top of their ministry and Holman seems a man of his time. He is perhaps a bit idealised apart from his trouble accepting Phillis growing up. Were any farmers that highly educated who also worked their land themselves?

    4. This short novel was intended to be in eight parts, but Gaskell only wrote six. What do you think happened next?

    I think Phillis was going to go stay with Paul's family and eventually would marry. Probably somebody other than Holdsworth, unless he came back widowed. However given Gaskell's track record she might have killed off one or both Phillis' parents and/or destroyed the farm through industrialisation or similar. Phillis would definitely have further difficulties, but I think she would get a happy ending, especially as Paul is narrating the story from a point in the future and there is no foreshadowing of Phillis ending her life in tragedy.

    5. Anything else you'd like to discuss?[/quote]

    I would love to know more about how they viewed 'brain fever' at this time and why they thought it was brought on by traumatic events. That was the most dramatic event of the book.
  • CaissaCaissa Shipmate
    1. Did you enjoy it?
    I enjoyed it as reflective of prose of that time period. I found it still read well in the 21st century.

    2. Do you think Gaskell intends to portray Holman's farm as a sort of Eden? If so is Holdsworth the serpent, or is it the creeping industrialisation of the area?

    I don't think it is meant to be Eden in a parallel to Genesis. It might be considered a refuge from society as it was progressing. I don't think Holdsworth was a serpent. I think he was an unaware young man who underestimated the effect that distance would have on his stated intentions. " If you can't be near the one you love, love the one you are near" would summarize his trajectory.

    4. Did you find the characters believable? Are there really pastors like Holman in the world? The characters were believable in the context of the time. There are pastors that were reported to be like Holman.

    4. This short novel was intended to be in eight parts, but Gaskell only wrote six. What do you think happened next?
    I think she was going to continue to recover, see the world and eventually marry.

    5. Anything else you'd like to discuss?
    Not at the moment.
  • TrudyTrudy Heaven Host
    Sarasa wrote: »
    It's the 20th so a few very general questions on Cousin Phillis to get us started

    1. Did you enjoy it?
    Yes, quite a bit. I think every time I've read Gaskell it's been for a Ship book club, and every time I've been pleasantly surprised at how readable she is. I never encountered her either in the course of two English degrees (one including a course in Victorian novels) or in my personal reading, and I'm not sure why she's so second-tier against novelists like Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, and earlier Austen or the Brontes.

    2. Do you think Gaskell intends to portray Holman's farm as a sort of Eden? If so is Holdsworth the serpent, or is it the creeping industrialisation of the area?
    I'm not sure if that was the intent, but I didn't see it as an Eden, nor as industrialization portrayed as a bad thing. I can see how it could be read that way, but it is really (to me) about change (personified by Holdsworth) coming into a very quiet, enclosed world that is even at that time somewhat stuck in the past, and shaking it up a bit. Paul as narrator and even Gaskell as author didn't really seem to me to be judging one way of life as good and the other as bad. The ending seems to leave open the possibility that Phillis will go on to find a broader life than that of her parents' farm.

    3. Did you find the characters believable? Are there really pastors like Holman in the world?
    As believable as any characters in a novel of that era! I do like it when truly good clergy people are portrayed in fiction -- it seems rare to me, both then and now. The Bishop in Les Miserables -- not just in the famous stolen silver incident but in the lengthy introduction that comes before it -- seems to be another of those genuinely good and holy clergy people in 19th c fiction.

    4. This short novel was intended to be in eight parts, but Gaskell only wrote six. What do you think happened next?
    I found the ending very abrupt! I was assuming all along that Phillis was going to die of brain fever/broken heart; when she proved to be made of somewhat sturdier stuff (yay Phillis!) I would have assumed the likely plot development would be for her and Paul to marry after all, as his father had wished -- after all, they liked each other, and I could see Paul offering as a way to heal her broken heart and them getting on just fine eventually. But of course we know that's not possible because Paul has already told us he marries the daughter of his father's business partner -- a neat little narrative trick, I thought, to slip that in so we know what DOESN'T happen after the rather open-ended ending.

    Given how tidied-away the endings of a lot of 19th c novels tend to be, I kind of enjoyed the open-endedness of this one, where we know that Phillis doesn't die of brain fever and doesn't marry Paul, so we are free to imagine many other possible endings for her story.

    5. Anything else you'd like to discuss?
    Like @Mili , I'm very interested in the "brain fever" plot twist. I'm interested in how illness is used in Victorian novels generally. People just simply were sicker back then, not just in the sense that so many died younger than we consider normal but also in that people lived with so much more chronic illness. But it's always interesting how much illness is tied to emotional distress, and I always wonder if that's just a literary device.

    The Wikipedia article on brain fever is interesting in that it primarily identifies it as a condition occurring in Victorian literature and associated with severe emotional upset (Cousin Phillis is one of the examples given). It does say that encephalitis and meningitis can be described as "brain fever," but neither they nor any of the other illnesses mentioned in the article would be brought on by emotional shock/strain.

    When Phillis was pining away for Holdsworth I thought for sure she was going to die of consumptions because of how often Paul noticed the glow of her cheeks, so the brain fever was a bit of a twist. I really wonder if Victorians, especially women, did get physically ill in response to emotional shock as often as portrayed in novels.

    Many other things to say about this but this has already been too long so I'll see what else comes up in conversation and maybe add more later!

  • SarasaSarasa All Saints Host
    Thank you for your thoughts so far, do post any other points/questions that occur to you.

    1. Did you enjoy it?
    This is one of my favourite books, not so much for the story but for the characters. Elizabeth Gaskell is so good at depicting characters that feel like real people, I find it very easy to imagine what these people would do in other situations.

    2. Do you think Gaskell intends to portray Holman's farm as a sort of Eden? If so is Holdsworth the serpent, or is it the creeping industrialisation of the area?
    This book was written in the 1860s looking back to the 1830s so I think there is a fair bit of nostalgia here. According to The Gaskell Society Hope Farm is based on Gaskell's grandfather's farm. She is probably imagining a life pre-industrialisation, though of course Manchester and Birmingham would have been very industrial cities by this time. It is a very isolated world, Paul and the bar maid can't understand each others accents for instance. It is also a world where change might not be welcome. Mrs Holman talks of 'tramps', by which Paul knows she means navvies. These men were often Irish so would have been seen as very foreign in rural Cheshire.

    3. Did you find the characters believable? Are there really pastors like Holman in the world?.
    I hope there are pastors like Holman in the world. He was someone who tried to live his faith in all he did. I liked his prayer list in his study for instance. The scene where the other pastors try to reconcile him to losing his daughter is the sort of scene Gaskell does so well. I'm thinking of the squire and his dead son in Wives and Daughters. He reminded me a bit of the clergyman in Gilead, I wonder if they would have got on?
    I liked the way that Holdsworth, the nearest thing to a villain, isn't that, just a young man with very different ways to the family at the farm.

    4. This short novel was intended to be in eight parts, but Gaskell only wrote six. What do you think happened next?
    I think Phillis would have got well while in Birmingham, and enjoyed being in a different place. I hope she'd get access to some more books and ideas while there. I imagine her returning home, well but still rather sad after about six months. Shortly after her mother would have died and she would keep house for her father until his death a few years later. She would then sell the farm and move to Eltham (aka 'Cranford'/ in reality Knutsford) and become one of the 'Amazons' there.

    5. Anything else you'd like to discuss?
    I think the brain fever is a bit of a misstep. Phillis seems all together too sensible to fall into severe depression because of Holdsworth. I too thought consumption, and maybe that is what Gaskell was originally going to visit her with. I don't know how many people recovered from TB in the 19th century, so maybe she thought that was too sad a fate for her. Unlike Beth in Little Women Phillis seems quite well before her collapse. Maybe Gaskell should have got her catch scarlet fever or the measles, which would make 'brain fever' (encephalitis) a decided possibility. I could see being run down could make those illnesses worth.

    I also like the way women's education is addressed in this book. Paul discounts Phillis as a possible wife as she is interested in learning. Paul's father's comments that she'd get over that when she had children is rather insulting to say the least. Also Holdsworth is entranced by her learning but wants to guard what she has access to, no unseemly words for instance. I assume Mr Gaskell didn't think that about his wife.
  • TrudyTrudy Heaven Host
    I found a good article about what "brain fever" meant to 19th c doctors as well as to 19th c novelists -- unfortunately I think you need to have a (free) JSTOR membership to read it. Basically the author argues that this was not simply a handy plot device for novelists -- doctors in that era recognized brain fever as a diagnosable illness with specific symptoms, and did tie its onset to emotional stress or mental strain. For these reasons, it was a handy device for novelists wanting to depict someone having a complete breakdown after receiving an emotional shock.

    I think one other thing that struck me about Cousin Phillis is what an incredibly small story it is -- and I don't mean that as a criticism! Even though 19th c novelists generally had to be very circumspect about how they wrote about sex, it's often there on the periphery of a story even if not alluded to directly. For example, in Pride and Prejudice when Lydia runs away with Wickham and he doesn't immediately marry her,, nobody alludes directly to the fact that the actual scandal is that she's openly having sex outside of marriage -- but we all understand that's happening. And sometimes, of course, it's even more direct when the consequences of a dalliance are an unwanted pregnancy.

    But there's none of that in Cousin Phillis. The cause of all the distress is not a man "taking advantage" of Phillis in the sexual sense -- or even going to far as to kiss her or otherwise do anything that might be seen as compromising her virtue. The entirety of the drama is brought on by the fact that Holdsworth and Phillis find each other mutually attractive but never say or do anything about it, he leaves and she is sad, Paul (perhaps unwisely) tells Phillis that Holdsworth loved her and wants to return to marry her, and then Holdsworth marries someone else. It's a pretty huge emotional reaction for a such a small, low-key series of events -- but also believable in the context of a girl as sheltered as Phillis, with so little exposure to men or to the world.

    And I think I like that about the novel -- that it takes a very tiny, un-earth-shattering series of events, and paints them in such loving detail.
  • MiliMili Shipmate
    I couldn't read the article, but thanks for the summary, Trudy. It's interesting it was considered a real disease by doctors.
  • LibsLibs Shipmate

    1. Did you enjoy it?
    Yes, I enjoyed it more than I expected to. I like Gaskell’s work but my general experience has been that ‘neglected’ works of literature or often neglected for a very good reason. I found the ending a bit disappointing, both because (even without the occasional hint of doom) it’s obvious that Holdsworth isn’t going to come back to marry Phillis but also because the whole ‘brain-fever’ thing is pretty tiresome. If the novel had been written a half-century later, maybe Phillis would have been left pregnant. That probably wouldn’t have worked but would have made a more interesting story.

    2. Do you think Gaskell intends to portray Holman's farm as a sort of Eden? If so is Holdsworth the serpent, or is it the creeping industrialisation of the area? I think the farm and the family’s life in it is idyllic, but the innocence depicted is not coupled with ignorance, and the knowledge Phillis seeks is not forbidden. Besides, Holdsworth isn’t particularly wicked – certainly not the embodiment of evil – he is merely a bit of a moral lightweight - which Holman senses, but then berates himself for judging the man unkindly
    Other critics have talked of a Sleeping Beauty motif, but I think that’s unfair to Phillis – she may be innocent but I think her quick understanding that her cousin-narrator is not the man for her shows that she is neither naïve nor lacking in self-awareness. The only thing I didn’t find credible was the father attacking Phillis for having been ready to leave home to be with the man she loved. He was too sensible for that.

    3. Did you find the characters believable? Are there really pastors like Holman in the world? I would like to believe there are people like Holman in the world, whether or not they hold a role in a religious group. I found him credible and particularly like the way he develops insights into his own failings

    4. This short novel was intended to be in eight parts, but Gaskell only wrote six. What do you think happened next? I think Gaskell realised that the novel had run into the sand – she’d made Phillis too weak and uninteresting to carry on. She might have planned for Phillis to find happiness again but how to make that interesting or exciting?

    5. Anything else you'd like to discuss? The Job’s Comforters in the final pages – weren’t they awful?! Perhaps Gaskell was preparing us for Holman to lose his faith, but I don’t see him setting off for a Northern Industrial town as Margaret Hale’s father did in the wonderful North and South
  • Libs wrote: »

    5. Anything else you'd like to discuss? The Job’s Comforters in the final pages – weren’t they awful?! Perhaps Gaskell was preparing us for Holman to lose his faith, but I don’t see him setting off for a Northern Industrial town as Margaret Hale’s father did in the wonderful North and South

    The Job's Comforters who start off by quoting Job.

    Phillis wants/wanted to learn but there aren't too many opportunities for her; she does not have the opportunity to live independently (and relatively comfortably) like Paul. One wonders what going to Birmingham will do.

    What is the class situation? Paul's father started working class and has moved up to middle class so Paul's initial job is a middle class job (and he also aims to move up). Phillis's family is also middle class though rural (land owning farmer with hired labor but still needing to work the land themselves). Her father is a minister but not Church of England so that does not improve their social class much despite his education.

    When does the novel take place? And how many years later is Paul narrating it?
  • SarasaSarasa All Saints Host
    edited January 2023
    I think the scene with the dreadful ministers in is so well done. I can't see Ebenezer Holman losing his faith it seems too strong for that. Gaskell says he is better educated than the other ministers so I guess he has at least a grammar school education even if he didn't go to university.

    Reading the descriptions of the farm house I'm reminded of a visit I paid to Isaac Newton's house in Lincolnshire. It was a solid house, large by today's standards but by no means a stately home. The guide said such farm houses were very common in the UK in Newton's time and though this story is set nearly 200 years later I guess there were still a lot around.

    Does anyone know what exactly an Independent minister was? Gaskell was a Unitarian, married to a Unitarian minister, but I don't think that is what Holman, Paul etc were. Are they exactly that just a lose federation of people who set up preaching?

    I'm not sure if it gives an exact date when the story is set, but I'm assuming it is somewhere in the late 1830s when the railways were expanding very quickly. I assume Paul is writing from the 1860s, so about twenty to thirty years later.
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