The Old Nurse’s Story Study Guide

Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was the youngest of eight children, but only she and one of her brothers lived past infancy. Her father was a minister in Lancashire before becoming the Keeper of Treasury Records, and her mother came from a prominent family. Her mother died a little over a year her birth. Her father panicked and sent Elizabeth off to live with Hannah Lumb, her aunt on her mother’s side. She would spend the rest of her youth living as a guest in her aunt and grandparent’s home, causing her future to seem rather uncertain, as she didn’t have any personal wealth or a permanent home. Elizabeth went many years without seeing her father, but her brother John visited her often until he went missing in 1827 while on an expedition with the Merchant Navy to India. Elizabeth received the standard education of a young woman from a wealthy family, and her father and aunt encouraged her to pursue her writing. In 1832, she married a minister named William Gaskell and settled in Manchester. Her first daughter was stillborn; however, she would go on to have four healthy daughters. In 1835, Gaskell started a diary to document her life as a parent and her observations of her children, specifically the relationship between her two eldest daughters. She co-authored a series of poems titled Sketches among the Poor with her husband in 1836. Her first work was published in 1840 under the authorship of “a Lady.” In 1841, they moved to Germany, and the literature she encountered there influenced her short stories which she published under the pseudonym Cotton Mather Mills. The death of her infant son, William, inspired Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, which was very successful. In 1850, the Gaskells were back in Manchester, where she wrote the remainder of her works and became well-connected to other writers. She died of a heart attack in 1865.

“The Old Nurse’s Story” was written in the Victorian Era, a defining time of change in England. In 1837, Queen Victoria took the throne as Britain began to grow in influence and expand its empire. However, in Britain itself, the 1840s presented failed harvests, earning them the title of the “Hungry Forties.” Despite this famine and raging unemployment, the industrial revolution took off, and by the 1850s had Britain on an economic rise. This allowed for years of progress, especially in science, medicine, and technology. These advances did not bring about much change for women’s role in society, however, as most women were still limited to marrying, childbearing, and taking interest in their husband’s occupations. Elizabeth Gaskell subverted these limitations on women’s roles by giving “The Old Nurse’s Story” a cast of female main characters who are strong and complex, a choice that would have been quite radical at this time.

Charles Dickens edited a weekly English newspaper called Household Words, in which he published Gaskell’s writing on multiple occasions, including her story “Lizzie Leigh” and her novels Cranford and North and South. “The Old Nurse’s Story” was also featured in Dickens’s A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. Looking toward other works from the mid 1800s, Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights shares similarities with “The Old Nurse’s Story,” in that it also takes place in a manor house in the countryside and involves the betrayal of a sibling and the presence of a ghost. The almost entirely female society featured in Gaskell’s Cranford is also similar to the female-dominated cast of “The Old Nurse’s Story,” indicating Gaskell’s overarching interest in closely examining women’s lives in her stories. Lastly, Gaskell said that Jane Austen influenced her writing.