If the path to heaven is as narrow as the proverbial “needle's eye,” a doctrinal idea entirely consistent with the evangelical bent of both the Rev. Obadiah Slope and Mrs. Proudie of Barchester Towers, the traditional channels of gossip appear equally constricted. Because, at least conventionally, the lower classes democratically gossip about the behavior of the upper classes (so as to bring them down to the level where they might be trafficked) rather than the other way around, Bishop Proudie's wife would do a disservice to her pronominal station were she to physically stoop to keyholes or chinks. She remains in posture as well as morally, upright, even if it is a strain. In contradistinction from the eavesdropping posture of the lower-class gossip, Mrs. Proudie misses another communicative channel of political culture: “that friendly pressure,” a little “extra squeeze of the hand” (BT I 167). Such is the inarticulated pressure conveying a bishop's consent to his chaplain's scheme for denying his wife's choice for an impending vacancy for the new warden of Hiram's Hospital. Although escaping the auditory register, it does not escape the omniscient narrator's awareness of a “force” having a formless mediacy.

Her social pride distances her from a lineage of gossips in nineteenth-century British fiction like Mrs. Bates (Emma) and Mrs. Norris (Mansfield Park); Nelly Dean (Wuthering Heights); Mrs. Cadwallader (Middlemarch); or later, the unforgettable Mrs. Bolton (Lady Chatterley's Lover). Not the unmarried singer of a community's hidden songs and secrets, typically beyond the age of marriage, an exemption which liberates them from participation in the marital market, Mrs. Proudie is the spouse of a bishop of the Church of England.