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.

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
Textual Features Shena Mackay
The stories here deal with all kinds of complexity and nuance in the sisterly relationship. The collection ends, as the introduction begins, with Christina Rossetti 's Goblin Market. The nineteenth century is further represented...
Textual Features Isabella Banks
IB describes the same industrial, working-class Manchester that novelists like Elizabeth Gaskell and social investigators like Friedrich Engels and Dr James P. Kay-Shuttleworth had already made famous in works such as Gaskell's Mary Barton...
Textual Features Adelaide Procter
Milly's Expiation is interestingly reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell 's North and South, 1855 (to which the Athenæum compared it), and anticipatory of George Eliot 's Felix Holt, 1866. Milly is an idealised elder...
Textual Features Isabella Banks
The novel's heroine, Muriel D'Anyer, comes from the manufacturing middle class of Manchester that IB herself was born into. Muriel is educated by her energetic grandmother, Sarah Bancroft, who successfully runs the family business. In...
Textual Features Jessie Fothergill
Of particular interest is JF 's handling of the benefits of cross-class mutual aid and moral principle
Debenham, Helen. “’Almost always two sides to a question’: the novels of Jessie Fothergill”. Popular Victorian Women Writers, edited by Kay Boardman and Shirley Jones, Manchester University Press, pp. 66-89.
76
as rich and poor, male and female, employer and workers, civil authorities and landowners join forces against...
Textual Features Marghanita Laski
The book aims at literary recuperation. Here ML blends analysis with celebration, but she recalls her marginalised writers primarily to raise questions about the present state of writing for children. She says that her subjects...
Textual Features Isak Dinesen
Stambaugh remarks that all the stories here are studies, specifically, of women's destinies.
Stambaugh, Sara. The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen. UMI Research Press.
28
The final, short one, The Ring, concerns a young woman, Lovisa, whose idyllic, clandestine courtship has recently ended in marriage...
Textual Features Ann Gomersall
After Fanny drops Charles for somebody of her own class, his father's death brings him the revelation that he is illegitimate: he must be reduced to the necessity of living by his industry!
Gomersall, Ann. The Citizen. Scatcherd and Whitaker.
1: 126
Textual Features Patricia Beer
PB here considers a series of canonical authors, Austen , Eliot , Charlotte Brontë , and Elizabeth Gaskell , and the way that the Woman Question was handled in fiction. Critic John Mullan notes her...
Textual Features Elizabeth Stone
Critic Monica Correa Fryckstedt considers ESthe first Manchester resident to write a novel about the manufacturing districts . . . . she conveys a vivid picture of the rising Lancashire cottonocracy.
Fryckstedt, Monica Correa. “The Early Industrial Novel: <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Mary Barton</span> and Its Predecessors”. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol.
63
, No. 1, The Library, pp. 11-30.
17-18
In the...
Textual Features Julia Wedgwood
JW was an energetic letter writer. Her letters to Emelia Russell Gurney , which cover an eleven-year span beginning in 1865, were collected by Gurney's niece in 1902. Wedgwood's sketch of Linlathen (Thomas Erskine
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 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 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 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...

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