Elizabeth Gaskell
born Sept. 29, 1810, Chelsea,
London, Eng.
died Nov. 12, 1865, near Alton, Hampshire
English novelist, short-story writer, and
first biographer of Charlotte Brontė.
She was a daughter of a Unitarian
minister. When her mother died, she was
brought up by a maternal aunt in the
Cheshire village of Knutsford in a kindly
atmosphere of rural gentility that was
already old-fashioned at the time. In 1832
she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian
minister, and settled in the overcrowded,
problem-ridden industrial city of
Manchester, which remained her home for the
rest of her life. Domestic life—the Gaskells
had six children, of whom four daughters
lived to adulthood—and the social and
charitable obligations of a minister’s wife
claimed her time but not all her thoughts.
She did not begin her literary career until
middle life, when the death of her only son
had intensified her sense of community with
the poor and her desire to “give utterance”
to their “agony.” Her first novel, Mary
Barton, reflects the temper of Manchester in
the late 1830s. It is the story of a
working-class family in which the father,
John Barton, lapses into bitter class hatred
during a cyclic depression and carries out a
retaliatory murder at the behest of his
trade union. Its timely appearance in the
revolutionary year of 1848 brought the novel
immediate success, and it won the praise of
Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle. Dickens
invited her to contribute to his magazine,
Household Words, where her next major work,
Cranford (1853), appeared. This social
history of a gentler era, which describes,
without sentimentalizing or satirizing, her
girlhood village of Knutsford and the
efforts of its shabby-genteel inhabitants to
keep up appearances, has remained her most
popular work.
The conflict between Mrs. Gaskell’s
sympathetic understanding and the strictures
of Victorian morality resulted in a mixed
reception for her next social novel, Ruth
(1853). It offered an alternative to the
seduced girl’s traditional progress to
prostitution and an early grave.
Among the many friends attracted by Mrs.
Gaskell was Charlotte Brontė, who died in
1855 and whose biography Charlotte’s father,
Patrick Brontė, urged her to write. The Life
of Charlotte Brontė (1857), written with
warmhearted admiration, disposed of a mass
of firsthand material with unforced
narrative skill. It is at once a work of art
and a well-documented interpretation of its
subject.
Among her later works, Sylvia’s Lovers
(1863), dealing with the impact of the
Napoleonic Wars upon simple people, is
notable. Her last and longest work, Wives
and Daughters (1864–66), concerning the
interlocking fortunes of two or three
country families, is considered by many her
finest. It was left unfinished at her death.
