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 review of Adam Bede is indeed most perceptive as well as detailed. AM
begins by noticing how novels have been expanding their empire: how many have been added to their readership by the newer...
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...
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
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: Mary Barton and Its Predecessors”. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol.
63
, No. 1, The Library, 1980, pp. 11-30.
17-18
In the...
Textual Features
Isa Craig
IC
's article has a documentary feel typical of much social investigation literature, particularly the seamstress narrative popularized by writers such as Thomas Hood
, Henry Mayhew
, and Elizabeth Gaskell
in her novel Ruth...
A young Roman Catholic priest ministers to a tiny parish in the fictional south-coast town of Hattering. His patroness, Lady Welford, is dictatorial; his housekeeper, Mrs Lucas, is a bad cook, weakly indecisive, and sometimes...
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
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
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...
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...
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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
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, 2004, pp. 66-89.
76
as rich and poor, male and female, employer and workers, civil authorities and landowners join forces against...
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!
qtd. in
Gomersall, Ann. The Citizen. Scatcherd and Whitaker, 1790, 2 vols.
