2 friends: a new friend and a loved friend.

It's been a tough week but that's not what this is about. Not directly, anyway. Having felt under the weather earlier in the week, I found myself at home in bed with a novel of some heft. By the end of my few days at home, I had finished my novel and found a new friend in Elizabeth Gaskell.
I'd heard her name many times before but had never read anything by her or heard much about her. The Cranford Chronicles landed in my hands in a round about way and so I had few expectations in reading it. On the back cover, The Independent promised it would be a "comic masterpiece" and I hoped it would be. I was not disappointed.
More and more, it's the small things in writing that move me: a perfect sentence, a tiny detail, a clause, a moment, a surprise on the next page and I found all of these things in Mrs. Gaskell. What's lovely about her writing is that it wanders along and then there's a bit of a turn and one finds one's self with a delightful little paragraph like this:

"-- she had had a cousin who spelt his name with two little ff's-- ffoulkes-- and he always looked down upon capital letters, and said they belonged to lately-invented families. She had been afraid he would die a bachelor, he was so very choice. When he met with a Mrs. ffarington, at a watering place, he took to her immediately, and a very pretty genteel woman she was-- a widow with a very good fortune; and my 'cousin,' Mr ffoulkes, married her; and it was all owing to her two little ff's" (164).

Nothing over the top but just a gentle little absurdity there for the taking. It's the little details in her writing that brought me such delight: the narrator, for example, recounts "I counted seven brooches myself on Miss Pole's dress. Two were fixed negligently in her cap (one was a butterfly made of Scotch pebbles, which a vivid imagination might believe to be the real insect)..."(175). Or, in another place, she transcribes a conversation: "Ye'll have been in Edinburgh maybe?' said she, suddenly brightening up with the hope of a common interest. We had none of us been there, but Miss Pole had an uncle who once had passed a night there, which was very pleasant" (178). In both of these cases, the brilliance is in the parenthetical detail ("which a vivid imagination might believe to be the real insect" and "which was very pleasant"); it is upon these little details that the beauty of the sentences rests.

I loved Mrs. Gaskell for these lovely little turns but I also found in her writing ideas and passages that resonated deeply with me. As I read, I had my laptop beside me: email chimed,twitter tweets chirped, Facebook chat windows popped and I was surrounded by the people I love and miss. As my laptop chimed, chirped and popped, I stumbled upon this passage from "My Lady Ludlow":

"I am an old woman now, and things are very different to what they were in my youth. Then we who travelled, travelled in coaches carrying six inside, and making a two day's journey out of what people now go over in a couple of hours with a whizz and a flash, and a screaming whistle, enough to deafen one. Then letters came in but three times a week: indeed, in some places in Scotland where I have stayed when I was a girl, the post came in but once a month; -- but letters were letters then; and we made great prizes of them, and read them and studied them like books. Now the post comes rattling twice a day, bringing short jerky notes, some without beginning or end, but just a sharp sentence, which well-bred folks would think too abrupt to be spoken. Well, well! they may all be improvements" (281).

This passage reminds me--- someone who spends much of her work day pondering, discussing, and theorizing technology and its impact on the written word-- that we should not be so arrogant to presume that we are the only ones who have confronted a quickly changing world and changing times.

Nor, I needed to remind myself, are we the first to have loved and lost a very good friend. Perhaps most remarkable to me was the discovery of two passages that I did not know how much I needed until I found them in the final pages of "My Lady Ludlow." In the first Mrs. Gaskell writes, "... and thoughts of illness and death seem to turn many of us into gentlemen and gentlewomen, as long as such thoughts are in our minds. We cannot speak loudly or angrily at such times we are not apt to be eager about mere worldly things, for our very awe at our quickened sense of the nearness of the invisible world, makes us calm and serene about the petty trifles of today" (449). In the second, the narrator reflects,

"I have often wondered which one misses most when they are dead and gone-- the bright creatures full of life, who are hither and thither and everywhere, so that no one can reckon upon their coming and going, with whom stillness and the long quiet of the grave seems utterly irreconcilable, so full are they of vivid motion and passion-- or the slow serious people, whose movements-- nay whose very words go by clock-work, who never appear much to affect the course of our life while they are with us, but whose methodical ways show themselves, when they are gone, to have been intertwined with our very roots of daily existence. I think I miss these last the most, although I may have loved the former best" (479).

In thinking about my dear friend-- I do not know which category she would be since she was both a "bright creature full of life" and someone who "intertwined with our very roots of daily existence." Mrs. Gaskell reminds me I am not the first to have lost a beloved friend but she does not chide me for the grief I feel; our worlds are so very different and yet so very similar.
My favourite authors have always been important to me. Like my closest friends, each has given me something different and something necessary. Some show me beauty, some show me strength; others offer humour; others love. Some challenge me, some support me. My best friends are those who do all of these. Mrs. Gaskell has worked herself on to the shelf of authors who seem like friends. I only wished we'd met earlier but I am ever grateful for meeting her this week.
And KN, please know I will miss you very, very much. I'm glad the last thing we did together was laugh. My world-- though it seems darker today--is brighter for having known you and I'll carry that always.