The Moorland Cottage
1850
In a secluded moorland cottage, a widow and her two children live in the shadow of their departed father, their days marked by quiet grief and unspoken longings. Maggie Browne watches as her mother reserves all affection for her brother Edward, while she is taught that a woman's highest calling is self-sacrifice. When new relationships arrive with the outside world, both children must confront the question of what they owe to themselves versus what they owe to one another. Gaskell writes with piercing tenderness about the devastating cost of putting oneself last, and the particular cruelty of a love that asks only one person to give up everything. The novel builds to a dramatic conclusion at sea that still resonates today. Often overlooked despite being a clear precursor to George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, this is Victorian fiction at its most emotionally honest about what families cost the people who make them.
Editions
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“But there was danger of the child becoming dreamy, and finding her pleasure in life in reverie, not in action, or endurance, or the holy rest which comes after both, and prepares for further striving or bearing. - chapter 3””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“Thus every hour in its circle brought a duty to be fulfilled; but duties fulfilled are as pleasures to the memory, and little Maggie always thought those early childish days most happy, and remembered them only as filled with careless contentment. -Chapter 1””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“If I thought I could ever grow as hard and different to the abject entreaties of a criminal as my father has been this morning–one whom he has helped to make, too–I would go off to Australia at once. Indeed, Maggie, I think it would be the best thing we could do. My heart aches about the mysterious corruptions and evils of an old state of society such as we have in England.–What do you say Maggie? Would you go?” She was silent–thinking. “I would go with you directly, if it were right,” said she, at last. “But would it be? I think it would be rather cowardly. I feel what you say; but don’t you think it would be braver to stay, and endure much depression and anxiety of mind, for the sake of the good those always can do who see evils clearly. I am speaking all this time as if neither you nor I had any home duties, but were free to do as me liked.” “What can you or I do? We are less than drops in the ocean, as far as our influence can go to model a nation?” “As””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“She listened to her story and her fears till the sobs were hushed; and the moon fell through the casement on the white closed eyelids of one, who still sighed in her sleep.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“She had never before ventured into the world, and did not know how common and universal is the custom of picking to pieces those with whom we have just been associating; and so it pained her.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“So little do we know of the inner truths of the households, where we come and go like intimate guests!) Maggie””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“Es una tontería pensar que debemos ir por la vida eligiendo hombres y mujeres como si fueran frutas, y tuviéramos que escoger siempre la mejor; como si no existiera algo en nuestros corazones que, si escuchamos con atención, nos dice enseguida que hemos encontrado a quien nos está destinado.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“¡Piénsalo un poco Frank! Quizá sea muy poco lo que puedas hacer... y quizá nunca conozcas su alcance, como tampoco conoció la viuda el alcance universal de su óbolo. Pero, si todos los hombres buenos y considerados huyeran a otro país, ¿qué haríamos con nuestra pobre y querida Vieja Inglaterra?””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“El hecho de que los demás observaran esa efusión había destruido la pureza de su sufrimiento.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
