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 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...
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 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 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...
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...
Reception Marie Belloc Lowndes
Again Harold Hannyngton Child approved this work, calling it the story of a great passion told with delicacy and power, a combination which is none too common.
Child, Harold H. “Barbara Rebell”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 197, p. 350.
350
In 1923 MBL wrote that years after...

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