Elizabeth Gaskell

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Standard Name: Gaskell, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson
Nickname: Lily
Married Name: Elizabeth Gaskell
Indexed Name: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Pseudonym: Cotton Mather Mills
Pseudonym: The Author of Mary Barton etc.
Self-constructed Name: E. C. Gaskell
Elizabeth Gaskell , one of the foremost fiction-writers of the mid-Victorian period, produced a corpus of seven novels, numerous short stories, and a controversial biography of Charlotte Brontë . She wrote extensively for periodicals, as well as producing novels directly for the book market, often on issues of burning interest: her industrial novels appeared in the midst of fierce debate over class relations, factory conditions and legislation; Ruth took a fallen woman and mother as its protagonist just as middle-class feminist critique of gender roles emerged. Gaskell occupies a bridging position between Harriet Martineau and George Eliot in the development of the domestic novel.
Photograph of a well-known head-and shoulders drawing of Elizabeth Gaskell by George Richmond, 1851. She looks calmly at the viewer, her smooth hair parted in the middle, with a ribbon or scarf hanging from her head and a bow at her neckline. She thought the drawing on the whole a good likeness. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Jessie Fothergill
She acquired much knowledge through her voracious consumption of books: I loved books, and read all that I could get hold of, and have had many a rebuke for poring over those books instead of...
Education May Sinclair
Little is known about the early education of MS or her brothers. She was taught the piano, and educated herself from her father's well-stocked library of Elizabethan, Restoration, and Victorian literature. Among her reading a...
death Charlotte Brontë
Her body was placed in the family vault in Haworth Church on April 4. When Gaskell heard of the circumstances of the death, she regretted she had not known; she would have hoped to save...
Cultural formation Julia Wedgwood
JW was born into that section of the English professional class which functioned as an intellectual and cultural elite. She was connected through her family with other Victorians strongly committed to spiritual and moral inquiry...
Cultural formation Hesba Stretton
As an adult HS abandoned her mother 's strict Methodism and became an incurable sermon-taster. She favoured several denominations at the extreme of Protestantism. During the twelve-year period recorded in her Log Books only three...
Cultural formation James Anthony Froude
He gradually lost faith in High Church tenets, however, a process that intensified under the influence of Thomas Carlyle . JAF was forced to relinquish his fellowship on publishing The Nemesis of Faith (1849), and...

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