Our 40th Annual General Meeting takes place at Cross Street Chapel in Manchester on Saturday 12 April, 2025.

10.00 Tea and Coffee

10.30 Annual General Meeting

11.45 The Daphne Carrick Memorial Lecture

‘It is only to the kindness of my friends that I can owe their company’ – Female Solidarity in the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell by Alice Jackman.

Female solidarity is a fundamental, yet under-explored, theme within the novels and short stories of Elizabeth Gaskell. Writing at a time when the ‘Woman Question’ was gaining prominence in the social fabric of Victorian society, Gaskell’s focus on the lives of women reveals a writer deeply concerned with the interrelations of female lives. 

This talk aims to probe Gaskell’s writing and expose her consistent messaging with regards to female alliance, both when it is strategically implied and when it is made explicit within the narrative, demonstrating Gaskell’s commitment to the ideals of female solidarity. Using four themes as a foundation for this exploration (mentoring, community, communication and empathy), Alice reveals how these themes are utilised in structure and narrative voice. This methodology reveals an embedded narrative concern with the positive outcomes that can be achieved when women support other women, regardless of age, marital status, class boundaries and societal expectations. Rather than positioning female friendship as a balm to patriarchal victimhood, she reorients the conversation away from viewing the female characters in relation to the male and focus on their relationships with each other, offering a broader theme of female interconnection.

Alice Jackman is a post graduate researcher and associatelecturer at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU). Her PhD considers the work of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell, exploring how the interconnection of the female walker and their environment is presented in the narrative form. Alice has been published in The Gaskell Journal and was joint organiser of the Elizabeth Gaskell Conference at ARU in summer 2023.

The AGM is free to all members and there is no charge for The Daphne Carrick Memorial Lecture, so please join us at Cross St or on Zoom.

Members on our emailing list will receive an invitation link by email.  

If you have any queries, drop us a line.