Getting "[be]wildered on the fells": Navigating upland ecologies in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cumbrian Tales

Elizabeth Gaskell was a recurring visitor to and ardent admirer of the English Lake District, its surrounding environs, and cultural history; and much more than this, its fellscapes appear as a recurring and material environment in a range of her short fiction. In ‘Martha Preston’ (1850), a child is rescued from the heights of Loughrigg by the story’s heroine, and he claims that as a result of the snow and subsequent lack of landmarks, he had become lost and ‘wildered on the fells’. As this chapter will explore, through variations of this episode, Gaskell adapts Dorothy Wordsworth’s tragic account of a Grasmere couple who were ‘bewildered’ when crossing the snow-covered hills, and in doing so, situates her own work in a tradition of regional and Lakeland literature. In ‘The Cumberland Sheep-Shearers’ (1853), the Gaskellian narrator recounts that ‘there [are] no lack of tales’ about ‘the wild and desolate Fells’, and this is realised by the author in several of her short stories set in the area. In ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852), Cumbrian hillsides become a treacherous site of ghostly encounter, Susan Dixon saves Michael Hurst from certain death on the fells in ‘Half a Life-Time Ago’ (1855), and two siblings lose their bearings in the mountains at night in ‘The Half-Brothers’ (1859). In tracing the palimpsestic iterations and variations of these climactic set-pieces closely, this essay examines the author’s psychogeographical depictions of individuals navigating and losing their way in this wild environment; a setting that can be rendered strange by altitude and climate, to the uninitiated and experienced Lakelander. Through an Ecocritical lens, this chapter meditates on the author’s familiarity with these bewildering environments and localised cultures, and in turn, reflects on what these upland narratives reveal about Gaskell’s interest in regional environments and ecological perception, more broadly.