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 Production Patricia Beer
PB 's Reader, I Married Him: A Study of the Women Characters of Jane Austen , Charlotte Brontë , Elizabeth Gaskell , and George Eliot was a harbinger of serious critical interest in the women's literary tradition.
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.
Sherry, Vincent B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 40. Gale Research.
25
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...
Literary responses Anna Letitia Barbauld
Literary admirers of the hymns included Hannah More , Anna Seward , and Elizabeth Carter , who found some passages amazingly sublime.
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
193
The innumerable children who loved and later remembered them included Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
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 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...
Publishing Isabella Banks
She continued writing for Notes and Queries until 1897, on a range of topics usually relating to Manchester as she had known it in her youth. Article titles included Street Lighting in Manchester Before Gas...

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