Architecture and the Built Environment Heterogeneous Spaces and Semi-Permeable Thresholds in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Writing

Beginning from the opening of The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), which first prioritises and then decentres the home, this chapter explores the resonances of architecture and the built environment in Gaskell's writing. Focusing especially on domestic space, it argues that Gaskell frequently depicts both heterogeneous spaces and semi-permeable thresholds, the latter of which combine partial access with forms of spatial resistance. After a critical overview of existing work on built space in Gaskell, the chapter shows how reading her writing intertextually, beyond the most commonly discussed novels Mary Barton (1848), North and South (1854–5) and Cranford (1851–3), can reveal various ways in which she regularly returns to the topic of temporal change as a force that shapes and reshapes space. The chapter concludes with a reading of the riot scene in North and South via the short story ‘Morton Hall’ (1853), which recontextualises that scene's interest in the threshold of the home and the protective or vulnerable role of the woman who guards it.