Book Review: My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell

My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I would really prefer to give this 3.5 stars because I really did enjoy it. It’s just … not other Gaskell books.

Margaret Dawson is impoverished when her father, a pastor with 9 children, passes away. A wealthy, widowed Countess relation offers to bring the 16yo to her home with her cohort of young, impoverished young ladies who she cares for. Margaret becomes something of an invalid and is a position to observe (and therefore report upon) Lady Ludlow’s conversations and actions. She’s acting as a companion, it’s not so much eavesdropping as she happens to be in the room where things happen 😉

Lady Ludlow is just lovely; she is generous, gentle, and kind. She is of the old guard, though, and loathe to change.

This story takes place during a rapid period of cultural upheaval quickly following upon the heels of the French Revolution. The upheaval is in work, class, education, and religion. Gaskell touches on all of those changes. There’s a many-chapters long story of why the French Revolution has put her back up against education and other societal changes. She thinks we ought to focus more on duties than on rights. Times, they are a changing, and she learns to make some concessions out of argument and out of love. She is the literal end of an “age that was” as none of her 9 children survive her.

Her kindness is expressed in a number of ways, her manners motivate her to act out of kindness when others are put upon, she cares for people and the reader has sympathy with her.

Gaskell’s movement toward progressive ideas has Lady Ludlow “come around” on a number of the issues broached in the book. In some ways those are arguments designed to move us to approve of them and I could imagine that this book was not well received in its time as “straw men.”

It does make me wonder about how winsomeness with principle is a lesson those of us who tend toward conservatism could learn. [and progressives could learn some lessons, too.]

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