Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Stevenson was born in London in 1810. Her mother died when she was a baby, and she was raised by an aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire, a small town that later became the model for her book Cranford. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister in Manchester, then a fast-growing industrial city. The couple had several children, and after the death of their infant son in 1845 she began writing her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), about the hardships of working families in Manchester. It was published anonymously and attracted wide attention. Charles Dickens invited her to write for his magazine Household Words, where Cranford, gentle sketches of life among the ladies of a country town, first appeared. Her other novels include Ruth, about an unmarried mother, North and South and Wives and Daughters, unfinished at her death. After the death of her friend Charlotte Brontë, she wrote The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). She died suddenly in Hampshire in 1865.

Elizabeth Gaskell is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: A Unitarian; her husband was minister of Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, Manchester. Source: Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) (via Wikisource)