Gaskell, Mrs Elizabeth Cleghorn

Gaskell, Mrs Elizabeth Cleghorn (1810–65) was brought up by her aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire (the original of ‘Cranford’ and of ‘Hollingford’ in Wives and Daughters). In 1832 she married William Gaskell, minister at the Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester; they had four daughters and a son who died in infancy. As a distraction from her sorrow at his death she wrote her first novel, Mary Barton (1848). It won the attention of Dickens, at whose invitation much of her work was first published in Household Words and All the Year Round. Her other full-length novels were Cranford (1853), Ruth (1853), North and South (1855), Sylvia's Lovers (1863), and Wives and Daughters (1866), which was left unfinished at her death. She also wrote the first and most celebrated biography of C. Brontë—which caused a furore because it contained some allegedly libellous statements which had to be withdrawn—and many vivid and warm-hearted short stories and novellas, of which the finest was Cousin Phillis (1864).

Mrs Gaskell was an active humanitarian and the message of several of her novels was the need for social reconciliation, for better understanding between employers and workers. She was a keen observer of human behaviour and speech, among both industrial workers in Manchester and farming and country-town communities, and a careful researcher of the background and technicalities of her novels. She had many friends, including Ruskin, Milnes, the Carlyles, Kingsley, and C. E. Norton. Her contemporaries classed her as a novelist with the Brontës and G. Eliot, but although Cranford has always remained a favourite her other novels were underrated in critical esteem for a full century after her death.