My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell is a short novel–or a long novella–about an older aristocratic woman in the changing times of the late 1700s.

Her story is told by Margaret Dawson, a distant relative, now an old woman looking back on her time with Lady Ludlow. When Margaret was a teenager, her father died, leaving her mother with nine children. To help out, Lady Ludlow offered for Margaret to come stay with her, where she “did her Christian duty” by several young “gentlewomen” who were “out of means.” So Margaret traveled several hours to Lady Ludlow’s manor.

In those days, the Lord or Lady of the manor had pretty much the authority of the whole area. Lady Ludlow had a strong sense of The Way Things Should Be, based on the way things had always been. She could seem imperious and intractable, but she had a kind and generous heart.

She had frequent arguments with the young rector as well as her own steward about educating the “lower classes.” Reverend Gray wanted to open a Sunday School and then a village school, to teach doctrine and prepare young minds for the world to come. Mr. Horner, the steward, cared more about the here and now and “wanted to make every man useful and active in this world.” He had taken it upon himself to educate a bright young boy who happened to be the son of a man known for poaching. Mr. Horner thought the boy could be saved from the kind of life he was otherwise sure to grow into and possibly even come to work for the estate.

“My lady would hear of neither one or the other.” She thought the teaching of doctrine was best done by the family and church. She called reading and writing “edge-tools,” saying, “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.” She thought that if the boy Mr. Horner was teaching, and others like him, learned to read and write, “his duties become complicated, and his temptations much greater, while, at the same time, he has no hereditary principles and honourable training to serve as safeguards.”

She then related a long story about friends in France who were killed during the Revolution, part of their fate hinging on a boy reading and sharing a message he should not have.

At first I wondered why Mrs. Gaskell created such a character. From what I’ve read about the author, Lady Ludlow’s views were not her views.

But, without spoiling the plot too much, Lady Ludlow gradually changes her thinking on many things. Then I realized the author was appealing to those who held the same views as Lady Ludlow, gently trying to open their eyes to other, better views.

My Lady Ludlow is one of the stories incorporated in the Cranford BBC TV series, along with the novel Cranford and another novella, Mr. Harrison’s Confessions, even though these stories don’t originally occur in the same place. The rector in the TV series is from one of the other books, so it’s sad that Rev. Gray wasn’t in the series. Mr. Horner, for some reason, is renamed Mr. Carter there. In the book, Lady Ludlow has one son remaining from her original nine, but he never appears at the manor. The TV series has him coming back as a ne’er-do-well, only interested in money, wanting to sell the estate to the railroad company. I know films can’t portray the books exactly, but when they add in their own plots, I want to say, “Go write your own books with your own characters, and don’t subvert those of others.”

Though Lady Ludlow is not as easy to like as Matty Jenkyns in Cranford, I did like the way she changed through the story.