Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
1810–1865
Biography
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born Elizabeth Stevenson in London in 1810. Her mother died when she was a baby, and she was raised largely by an aunt in Knutsford, a small market town in Cheshire, which later served her as a model for the town of Cranford. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister, and the couple settled in Manchester, the great industrial city of the north. Her years there, among mill workers and their families, gave her the subject of her first novel, Mary Barton, published in 1848. It is a study of poverty and bitterness in Manchester's working families, written for readers who had little contact with them.
Her other novels followed the same concern with how people lived under pressure. Cranford, published in instalments from 1851 to 1853, is a gentle, funny set of sketches about a community of women in a small town, and it is still among her best-loved works. North and South, from 1854 to 1855, follows the daughter of a former clergyman from the south of England to Milton, a fictional northern manufacturing town modelled on Manchester, where the mill owners' view of things is set against that of the workers and their strike. She also wrote The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), a biography that caused controversy when it appeared but did much to fix the Brontë family's fame. She died in 1865 while writing Wives and Daughters, which was left unfinished.
On this site you can read Cranford and North and South. Cranford shows her at her most relaxed, watching a community of women with affection and a sharp eye for its manners. North and South is the harder book, and one of the most important novels about the industrial north, where class, religion and money press on every choice the characters make. Between them they show a writer who could be comic and tender in one book and hard-edged in the next.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Cranford
by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Cranford is an episodic novel by English author Elizabeth Gaskell. It first appeared in instalments in the magazine Household Words, then was published with minor revisions as a book with the title Cranford in 1853. The work slowly became popular and from the start of the 20th…
Summary from Wikipedia: Cranford (novel) (CC BY-SA 4.0)North and South
by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
North and South is a social novel published in 1855 by English author Elizabeth Gaskell. With Wives and Daughters (1866) and Cranford (1853), it is one of her best-known novels and was adapted for television three times (1966, 1975 and 2004). At first, Gaskell wanted the novel…
Summary from Wikipedia: North and South (Gaskell novel) (CC BY-SA 4.0)