Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
The Blackstick Papers treat a wide range of topics; three of the thirteen concern women writers, and the book's frontispiece is from a miniature of Felicia Hemans
. ATR
notes the stoicism
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Blackstick Papers. Books for Libraries Press.
This volume brings together pieces from various occasions and venues. In them MR
discusses many of her favourite topics—the food, sex and god named in her title, the second and third often involving the relation...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Robins
ER
's novel White Violets, or, Great Powers, which she wrote in 1909 (just after the first unexpurgated appearance of Elizabeth Gaskell
's life of Charlotte Brontë
), remained unpublished, for reasons that are...
Literary responses
Christina Rossetti
Gabriel
anticipated critics when he described Commonplace as a prose tale . . . rather in the Austen
vein.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Editors Doughty, Oswald and John Robert Wahl, Clarendon Press.
2: 818
Contrasting Commonplace, and Other Short Stories with tawdry romance,
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2223 (1870): 734
the...
Literary responses
J. K. Rowling
Of course nobody could review this book without implicit or explicit reference to the Harry Potter books. What, some wondered, would devoted child readers make of the sex and swearing? The novel violently divided commentators...
Family and Intimate relationships
John Ruskin
The next year she married her husband's protégé the painter John Everett Millais
. Rumours of an affair between Effie and Millais, and gossip surrounding the annulment, produced speculation and scandal. Elizabeth Gaskell
sided with...
Writing for the Athenæum, Elizabeth Gaskell
was convinced the author was a woman because the person who would call a horse a pleasure-giving thing, and talk so fluently of imaginings and questionings...
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...
Friends, Associates
Flora Shaw
Here she became a friend of novelist and neighbour George Meredith
, who introduced her to a wider social circle, including W.T. Stead
, the scandalous journalist and editor of the Pall Mall Gazette...
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...
Textual Production
May Sinclair
Her introductions to Jane Eyre and Shirley followed in February 1908, that to Elizabeth Gaskell
's The Life of Charlotte Brontë in June 1908, and those for Villette, The Professor, and The Tenant...
Occupation
Lucy Toulmin Smith
Manchester College (now Harris Manchester College
) had a long and distinguished history as a Dissenting institution (including spells at York and London) before it moved to Oxford in 1889 and into new buildings...
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth Stone
Elizabeth Gaskell
wrote that ES
's husband was a clergyman. Critic Michael Wheeler
speculates that he was the Rev. Thomas Stone
, whom ES
would have met while he was the Curate of Deane...
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.
