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
Textual Features George Eliot
This story is equally remarkable for the portraits of Mr Tryan (the Evangelical clergyman who not only converts Janet to his beliefs but succeeds in sparking her will to regeneration) and of Janet herself, but...
Textual Features Charlotte Brontë
The novel focuses on the Luddite riots in Yorkshire in the Napoleonic era. Shirley Keeldar, an heiress with a man's name who revels in her unconventionality (and who was, according to conversation Elizabeth Gaskell had...
Textual Features Flora Macdonald Mayor
The Rector's Daughter showcases once again FMM 's ability to make literature and her own experiences immediately relevant, as well as her outspokenness. Condensing the friction between the dying Victorian world and the modern world...
Textual Features Vera Brittain
In her Prologue, VB cited Mrs Gaskell 's Life of Charlotte Brontë as an influence. She also lamented the absence of positive representations of female friendship: I hope that Winifred's story may do something to...
Textual Features Isa Craig
IC 's article has a documentary feel typical of much social investigation literature, particularly the seamstress narrative popularized by writers such as Thomas Hood , Henry Mayhew , and Elizabeth Gaskell in her novel Ruth...
Textual Features Anne Mozley
The review of Adam Bede is indeed most perceptive as well as detailed. AM begins by noticing how novels have been expanding their empire: how many have been added to their readership by the newer...
Textual Features Ella D'Arcy
A young Roman Catholic priest ministers to a tiny parish in the fictional south-coast town of Hattering. His patroness, Lady Welford, is dictatorial; his housekeeper, Mrs Lucas, is a bad cook, weakly indecisive, and sometimes...
Textual Features Dorothy L. Sayers
Here she mounts a powerful appreciation of the novel, both for its importance in the development of the detective story (all the clues, she says, are clearly conveyed to the reader, something which seldom happened...
Textual Features Agnes Maule Machar
Roland Graeme, Knight incorporates wide-ranging allusions to figures such as Goethe , Dickens , Browning , Ruskin , Thoreau , Tennyson , Carlyle , and Handel . Critic Carole Gerson compares it to earlier nineteenth-century...
Residence Alison Uttley
AU and her husband first settled in the seventeenth-century Old Vicarage at Knutsford in Cheshire. Knutsford was, of course, the setting of Elizabeth Gaskell 's Cranford, and to AU 's delight, the Old...
Residence Charlotte Brontë
In early April 1820, the Brontës moved to Haworth, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where their father took up the position of perpetual curate. Despite the depiction of the village as an isolated...
Residence Anne Brontë
Despite the depiction of the village as an isolated, primitive place full of uneducated, violent inhabitants (by Elizabeth Gaskell in her Life of Charlotte Brontë), it was a busy mill town of about 4,500...
Residence Geraldine Jewsbury
GJ and her brother Frank first set up house at 4 Lloyd Street in Manchester. They then, in 1843, moved to 30 Carlton Terrace, Greenheys Lane in a village called Greenheys, near Manchester...
Residence Selina Davenport
Both during and after her marriage SD lived at Knutsford in Cheshire (which was not only her husband's home but also the original of the town in Gaskell 's Cranford, published in volume form...
Reception Mary Howitt
MH 's biographer Joy Dunicliff credits her with introducing the reading public to both Keats and Gaskell .
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London.
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