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.
Elizabeth Gaskell
was also a visitor, friend, and neighbour. Returning one of her visits, GJ
was reportedly found sitting on the floor of Gaskell's drawing-room, reading aloud from Charles Lamb
's The Essays of Elia.
Howe, Susanne. Geraldine Jewsbury: Her Life and Errors. George Allen and Unwin.
23
Reception
Geraldine Jewsbury
Many readers, including George Henry Lewes
, were suspicious of this novel's sympathetic portrait of manufacturers, and speculated that Marian Withers was Jewsbury's response to Elizabeth Gaskell
's Mary Barton, which had presented factory...
GJ
was an advocate of realist novels with well drawn characters and a coherent plot. Her review of Charlotte Chanter
's Over the Cliffs compared the plot to a child's attempt at drawing a picture,—the...
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...
Textual Production
Annie Keary
AK
's next novel, Oldbury, was compared by some critics to Gaskell
's Cranford, because it is a study of a small provincial community, a backwater out of the mainstream.
The Spectator. F. C. Westley.
42 (1869): 683
Intertextuality and Influence
Annie Keary
She took as implicit motto for all her own writings the words from Thomas Carlyle
's Biography (on the foolishness of both writer and subject) with which Elizabeth Gaskell
prefaced Mary Barton.
Keary, Eliza. Memoir of Annie Keary. Macmillan.
196
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Margaret Kennedy
Here Kennedy argues that entertainment and enjoyment are valuable aims for the novel. She maintains that the novelist is, in essence, a storyteller, but the storyteller-novelist has been excluded by a literary society that devalues...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Q. D. Leavis
The Roths were devastated by their daughter's decision to marry a gentile. They disowned her and ceased to give her any financial support. However, this period had its happy moments as well. Q. D. introduced...
Performance of text
Rosamond Lehmann
A new departure for RL
was a lecture on Elizabeth Gaskell
, which she gave at Leicester University
in autumn 1953.
Hastings, Selina. Rosamond Lehmann. Chatto and Windus.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
16
Publishing
Mary Linskill
One of the pieces in this volume, Cornborough Vicarage was said in the Feminist Companion to have been serialized in Good Words, but Stamp thinks it unlikely that any of the volume's contents had...
Friends, Associates
Eliza Lynn Linton
Eliza Lynn met a number of women authors who were once applauded but later complacently forgotten . . . . as literary fossils.
Linton, Eliza Lynn, and Beatrice Harraden. My Literary Life. Hodder and Stoughton.
85
She contended that Women who wrote were then few and far...
