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When the 1851 census reported an "excess" of some half-million women in Britain, feminists and anti-feminists quickly took to the press to debate the implications of the demographic imbalance. Yet Victorian novelists also wishing to convey and alter the "Condition of England" experienced something of a quandary: How should fiction respond to news of the imbalance, and what options could be suggested for resolving it?
While anti-feminists such as W. R. Greg, a literary and social critic, argued notoriously that Britain's "surplus" women would never marry and should thus be thought socially "redundant," Elizabeth Gaskell sought to rethink and revalue the concept of "redundancy" itself.1In the three novels she wrote immediately before and after the 1851 census, two of which Greg reviewed, she contributed to the debates by incorporating - then increasingly defending - the idea of literary redundancy. Ingeniously, that is, she tackled the narrative equivalent of Greg's social pronouncements. First targeting the assumption that matrimony represented a triumphal point of narrative closure, a notion dating to the novel's earliest forms in the eighteenth century, Gaskell then challenged the related claim that episodes and plotlines should work concertedly toward that end.
To upend those assumptions, Gaskell briefly but significantly handed the reins of her narrative to older, unmarried women - figures that more conventional novels generally sidelined. The episodes that result from Gaskell's strategy enlarge the emotional scope of the story while slowing its progress. With these "detours," Gaskell reenacted the perceived crisis of "superfluity" in narrative terms, pitting the novel's excessive elements against critics' assumptions that a work of fiction should move incrementally and lineally toward closure in marriage. Her digressive stories, I will argue, strongly encouraged readers to rethink the concept of "redundancy" as a literary error and an alleged social ill.
Gaskell's first three novels were not just contemporaneous with the 1851 census, but also centrally concerned with it. Mary Barton, her first novel, appeared in 1848, three years earlier, but Ruth and Cranford were published in 1853, with the latter beginning serialization in 1851.2Considering the thematic concerns of each novel - unemployment and poverty; a "fallen" girl; and a community of "old maids," respectively - their relation to the...