Dissembling fictions

by Deirdre D'Albertis

In Dissembling Fictions, Deirdre d'Albertis uncovers the tactics of disguise that Gaskell skillfully employed in order to evade prescribed notions of what a Victorian woman novelist should write, unveils the complex patternings of gender and genre in Gaskell's works, and examines her use of dissembling as a narrative practice. A writer on the periphery in both traditional and feminist literary histories, now gradually being reclaimed by the canon, Gaskell is revealed as someone who consistently returned to narratives that offered readers as much as they withheld, creating stories that suggest rather than state and that ultimately challenge us to rethink presumed gender identifications of Victorian women novelists. An illuminative study that also proposes that feminist readers take a fresh look at the very idea of a separate tradition for women's writing in light of Gaskell's example, Dissembling Fictions is a thorough and appealing analysis of an underappreciated writer whose influence