"The Victorian and the Romantic," by Nell Stevens

“The Victorian and the Romantic” (Doubleday, 2018), by Nell Stevens, is my kind of book! Its subtitle is “A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship across Time,” and it is all of that. The author is a writer writing about a famous writer (Elizabeth Gaskell) who writes a famous biography of another, even more famous, writer: Charlotte Bronte. Gaskell and Bronte are two of my favorite writers, so of course I was drawn to this book. But I was both interested and hesitant, as I have been disappointed by some (but definitely not all) other books of this genre – books about the connections between a current writer and a writer from the past. This one comes through grandly, with much information about Gaskell, focused on her brief time in Rome, where she met her great soulmate, the American writer Charles Eliot Norton, who was seventeen years younger than she was. Gaskell was respectably if not particularly happily married, with four daughters, and there was never an explicitly sexual or romantic relationship between her and Norton, but she did consider him her great love. About half of the book is about Gaskell, and the other half about Stevens; we are given alternating chapters about the two. Part of Stevens’ story is about her PhD research on Gaskell; the other part is about her tumultuous, on again/off again relationship with her own soulmate, Max, a fellow writer. She seems to be very candid about the relationship and about her strong feelings of love and also of grief when the two are apart, geographically or otherwise. However, in her acknowledgments section, she includes this line: “To the man who is like and not like Max in this story…”, leaving this reader wondering how much was true and how much not. I have read enough memoirs to know that there is an element of subjectivity and selectivity in most memoirs, and that often certain disguises occur to save the feelings of those being described, so this acknowledgment is not shocking, but I still found it somewhat disconcerting. Finally, though, the point of the book is not the exact literal truth of any event, either in Gaskell’s life (which is somewhat fictionalized by Stevens) or Stevens’ own life, but in the emotional truths, and in the connections between the two writers (three, if you count Bronte).