and the co-editor of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance (2019). More recently, she has co-edited the collection Women, "Failure" and Academia: Activism, Creativity and Critique in the Contemporary University (2026).
Cano applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Theatrical Afterlives: Nineteenth-Century Women's Novels on the Stage, with the following results:
I open my book, Theatrical Afterlives, in search of that potentially defining page, page 99. I am thrilled to discover that it falls on one of my favourite chapters: Chapter 3, “Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford in Suffrage Times.” How exciting!Learn more about Theatrical Afterlives at the Oxford University Press website.
This chapter explores dramatic productions of Gaskell’s best-known, best-loved novel by groups of suffragettes, and argues that such dramatic offspring sheds light on the novel itself, by making readers aware of its potentially pro-suffrage verve. This links back to the argument of the book as a whole: that the theatrical afterlives of nineteenth- century women’s novels are a prism through which we can look back at the novels, and that, when we do so, we discover different shapes and colours—like with a kaleidoscope.
But, first of all, what exactly is going on here? Page 99 contains part of my discussion of how Miss Pole, one of the formidable spinsters that inhabit the town of Cranford, can be read as a suffragette foremother. The section starts on page 98, so by page 99 we are still at the beginning of the discussion. On page 98, I have been laying out how suffrage actresses, members of the suffrage group Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL), played the character of Miss Pole with heightened aggressivity at the International Suffrage Fair of 1912. By page 99, I turn from the stage to the page to seek what basis there is for such rendition in Gaskell’s novel.
I explore, for example, one of Miss Pole’s speeches in Chapter 10 of the novel, where she claims to know the male sex really well. She knows that men wish “to be considered Samson and Solomon rolled into one.” After all, “My father was a man, and I know the sex pretty well.” On this, I claim that “Gaskell’s Miss Pole appears here as an activist and feminist protester, criticising that sacrosanct system of Victorian authority: patriarchy, and especially parental rule.” Her speech, in fact, is motivated by an encounter with the local doctor, Mr Hoggins, who, Miss Pole claims, has been mugged by a group of robbers, an incident he repeatedly denies (rightly, as it turns out).
So, to go back to the Page 99 Test, is this page representative of the book as a whole? v To my surprise, the answer is yes. The page starts with the sentence “The use of the qualifying adverb ‘even’ points to the connections between Cranford the novel, Cranford the dramatizations and the suffrage movement.” Here I am close reading a review of the AFL’s performance of Cranford. I then turn to the novel to unpick some of these connections between the stage and the page (through the Mr Hoggins discussion and Miss Pole’s aggressivity).
Interestingly, the end of the page takes us back to the stage, to the Cranford productions by the AFL and the WFL (Women’s Freedom League). Page 99 concludes by further exploring the connections between Miss Pole, Gaskell’s character, and the WFL, one of the radical groups of suffrage fighters. To reinforce the connection, I quote the WFL’s call to arms, and make the point that it retrospectively resonates with Miss Pole’s own aggressive harangue in the novel: “To arms, Freedom Leaguers! The thought of our tortured prisoners of war should…” This is where page 99 ends, in the midst of the WFL’s rallying cry.
Now this dance—from the stage to the page and back to the stage and its historical context—is representative of the book as a whole and of the key strands that the book weaves together. It is also representative of its key ideas: these theatrical productions tell us something about the reception history of nineteenth-century novels by British women writers (in this case, that Gaskell and her novel had an eventful afterlife among suffrage fighters and players).
But the plays also uncover something about the novels that has largely gone unnoticed, some socially progressive undercurrent: the pro suffrage sympathies of Cranford in this case, a novel that Gaskell wrote in the 1840s, when the movement for the female vote was budding in England. (Gaskell herself corresponded with some suffragettes and supported their journalistic endeavours). After all, in Gaskell’s Cranford, women are enfranchised already: they are the sole homeowners in town and make all local decisions. They are the “Amazons” that the narrator, half-jokingly, describes them as, at the start of the novel.
Other chapters in Theatrical Afterlives engage in a similar choreography, this time through prison theatricals (in connection to Jane Austen), the Irish stage and colonial histories (in connection to the Brontës), late twentieth-century British experimental theatre (George Eliot), and the woman question and the New Woman of the mid to late nineteenth century (Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon). So, there is much more to discover!
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
