Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810–1865) was an English novelist and short-story writer. Born in London, she spent much of her childhood with her aunt Hannah Lumb in Knutsford, Cheshire; the town later informed Cranford. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister, and made her home in Manchester. The city’s industrial life informed Mary Barton (1848), the novel that first brought her wide notice. She published Cranford in installments in Charles Dickens’s Household Words between 1851 and 1853, shaping its comedy of visits and social rules around a recognisable community.

Gaskell’s work also includes Ruth, North and South and Wives and Daughters; she wrote biography as well as fiction. Her Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, drew on their friendship and on letters gathered after Brontë’s death. Gaskell’s writing moved between social novels, short stories and historical fiction, often attending to the pressures of work and class and the forms of care people offer one another. Wives and Daughters remained unfinished when she died in 1865. Her work combines close observation of industrial Manchester with the smaller customs of domestic and village life.