Published in 2019
583 pages
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born in London in 1810, but she spent her formative years in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon and the north of England. In 1832 she married the Reverend William Gaskell, who became well known as the minister of the Unitarian Chapel in Manchester’s Cross Street. As well as leading a busy domestic life as minister’s wife and mother of four daughters, she worked among the poor, traveled frequently and wrote. Mary Barton (1848) was her first success.
What is this book about?
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848. The best-known of her remaining novels are Cranford (1853), North and South (1854), and Wives and Daughters (1865). Gaskell became popular for her writing, especially her ghost stories, aided by Charles Dickens, who published her work in his magazine Household Words. Her supernatural stories are superior examples of the sentimental ghost tale so typical of the Victorian period. They combine a taste for the macabre with a deeply-felt sympathy for the extremes of female experience.
