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AN ACCOUNT OF JANE AUSTEN'S earliest literary legacy-one that would track the influence she exerted upon writers nearest to her own time-might productively consider the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. Mrs. Gaskell's North and South (1854-55) has all the makings of a deftly refashioned Pride and Prejudice. Here the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy is replayed when Margaret Hale's prejudice against the North and so-called "shoppy people" prompts her hasty misjudgment of John Thornton, the Milton manufacturer (19). Like all clever adaptations, Gaskell's has a twist, as it inverts our gendered expectations of the main protagonists: it is the "queenly" Margaret, not Thornton, who intimidates with a proud bearing and a "straight, fearless, dignified presence habitual to her" (57). In Gaskell, Margaret plays the proud Darcy, as it were. Originally published as a serial in Household Wordsiw 1854 with Charles Dickens's editorial assistance, North and South may be the first full-length reworking of Pride and Prejudice. If this novel proves the Victorian ancestor of the cornucopia of modern adaptations that have deliciously reset Austen's original in contemporary environs, Gaskell's Milton (a thinly disguised Manchester) may have paved the way for Cohen's Boca Raton.1 In sharp contrast, however, to those adaptations that proudly flaunt their Janeite lineage, North and South masked any debt to Austen. That is to say, Gaskell never acknowledged an influence outright, and, as a result, historians of the novel have never observed more than a vague family resemblance between her fictions and Austen's. In an argument such as this, authorial intention must remain speculative, but perhaps Gaskell's close relationship to Charlotte Brontë, who is known to have disapproved of Austen, explains this peculiar omission.
By 1854, Gaskell could not have been ignorant of Austen's work and its increasing hold over popular taste. True, after the posthumous double publication of Northanger Abbey with Persuasion in December of 1817, no English reissue of her novels took place until Richard Bentley included them in his series of Standard Novels in 1833 (Gilson 211). Judging by the book market's apparent lack of interest, fifteen years of relative obscurity followed Austen upon her death, as her legacy lay dormant. But in the wake of Bentley' s republication of Austen's six novels in his relatively inexpensive series,...