‘We will still be husband and wife’: The Servant as Spouse in Gaskell’s ‘The Grey Woman’

Abstract

Among the stories included in the 2000 collection of Gothic Tales by Elizabeth Gaskell is ‘The Grey Woman,’ a fascinating but understudied novella. While other stories in the collection remain in the ‘Gothic’ tradition suggested by the title, ‘The Grey Woman’ is not easily classified as such. Diana Wallace’s 2004 article on ‘The Grey Woman’ describes it as a revised Bluebeard tale, a story in the ‘female Gothic’ tradition, and an ‘uncanny story’ in which the ‘ghost’ is the symbolically ‘murdered’ Anna (60–61). Although the story has many Gothic elements—among them, a framing narrative featuring a mysterious portrait and a hidden letter, and a plot concerning a heroine trapped in a castle with a villain—it does not strictly conform to the conventions of either ‘male’ or ‘female’ Gothic modes.¹ In fact, though the hybrid nature of Gaskell’s story makes it so difficult to categorize, as Shirley Foster has suggested, ‘The Grey Woman’ may be best considered as an example of the sensational school (119).²