1810-1865 · English novelist and biographer, author of North and South and Cranford
Posthumous or imagined likeness of Elizabeth Gaskell. Source · Public domain
About Elizabeth Gaskell
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810–1865), born Elizabeth Stevenson in Chelsea, was brought up by her aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire, the town behind Cranford. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister in Manchester, where she raised her family and worked among the poor. Her novels include Mary Barton (1848), Ruth (1853), North and South (1854–55) and the unfinished Wives and Daughters; her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) was the first biography of her friend.
Cranford is a small English country town, twenty miles by railway from the busy commercial city of Drumble, where nearly every householder of the better sort is a single lady or a widow. The narrator, Mary Smith, a young woman from Drumble, visits often and describes their code: calls of exactly fifteen minutes, card parties with wafer bread-and-butter, and an 'elegant economy' that treats spending as vulgar and never names poverty.
Ruth is Gaskell's novel about a 'fallen woman', written to challenge the Victorian assumption that an unmarried mother and her child were beyond redemption. Ruth Hilton is a beautiful, innocent orphan of fifteen, apprenticed to a dressmaker, Mrs Mason, in a country town, where she works long hours in a cold workroom.
