My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell

I decided to go with My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell (1858) for this year's Victober category -  choose a Victorian novel where chronic illness or disability is represented.  I was nervous about this category.  What would it have been like to be disabled in the 19th century?  But I finished My Lady Ludlow in good spirits.  This is a sweet and uplifting story about the impact a good person can make in the lives of others. 

The narrator of My Lady Ludlow is Margaret Dawson and when the novel begins she is an elderly woman looking back to 1800 when at age 16 she was sent to live with a distant relative, the Countess Ludlow of Hanbury Court.  Margaret's parents with nine children to raise had no choice but to accept Lady Ludlow's offer to have Margaret stay with her. 

When Margaret arrives at  Hanbury Court n the Village of Hanbury she meets other young women of aristocratic background who have fallen on hard times.  Lady Ludlow is running a kind of boarding school where the young women learn the skills one needs to get on in the world.  

Lady Ludlow can be strict in terms of how she likes things done but she is a decent, kind person.  The girls think highly of her and for Margaret, who narrates the book, this is particularly true because a year after Margaret Dawson arrives at Hanbury Court she starts to have trouble walking.  The situation deteriorates and Margaret is left crippled. 

Lady Ludlow could have sent Margaret back home to her parents. She doesn't do that.  Instead without ever mentioning Margaret's disability Lady Ludlow invites her to the office one day, gets a comfortable chair for Margaret to sit in, and explains that she has been needing an assistant and would Margaret be willing to help her out.  

As the years go by Margaret becomes a friend to Lady Ludlow and is often the sounding board for Lady Ludlow's opinions and she has strict opiions about the class system and people knowing their place.   A new young pastor for example, Mr. Gray, arrives in Hanbury with all kinds of revolutionary new ideas as Lady Ludlow sees it and she is not amused, particularly on the subject of educating the lower classes.  As she tells Margaret: 

"It was a right word,” she continued, “that I used, when I called reading and writing ‘edge-tools.’  If our lower orders have these edge-tools given to them, we shall have the terrible scenes of the French Revolution acted over again in England ... When I was a girl, one never heard of the rights of men, one only heard of the duties" 

Lady Ludlow is not perfect but she has empathy maybe because her own life despite her wealth and privilege has not been easy.  She is a widow and she lost all her children but one, her son Rudolph who lives in London.   She is rather lonely and one senses that the town of Hanbury is her family.  She keeps abreast of the goings on in the town and if anyone needs help no matter what class she will be there to see what she can do and as the times change, Lady Ludlow changes with them, including her views on educating the working classes.

Elizabeth Gaskell's great novels are North and South, Cranford, Wives and Daughters, Mary Barton and so if you have never read her that is where you should begin.  But I found My Lady Ludlow a heartwarming novel and what I have discovered in the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell is that she bridges the gap in her books between Jane Austen where  the lower classes are firmly off stage and Charlotte Bronte where if a Lord or Lady does show up in the text it's probably not in a flattering way.   Elizabeth Gaskell was more interested in bridging the divide knowing that people are not that different no matter their classs and that the times were changing.