The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

We've read quite a few books by Elizabeth Gaskell in this group. There's a thread on her in the "A Focus on Our Authors" folder, but I'll just post a bit of biographical information here too. This is from Wikipedia:

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson; 29 September 1810 – 12 November 1865), often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Brontë. In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë's life; the rest she omitted, deciding certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden. Among Gaskell's best known novels are Cranford (1851–1853), North and South (1854–1855), and Wives and Daughters (1864–1866), all of which were adapted for television by the BBC.

Gaskell was born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson on 29 September 1810 in Lindsey Row, Chelsea, London, now 93 Cheyne Walk.[1] The doctor who delivered her was Anthony Todd Thomson, whose sister Catherine later became Gaskell's stepmother.[2] She was the youngest of eight children; only she and her brother John survived infancy. Her father, William Stevenson, a Unitarian from Berwick-upon-Tweed, was minister at Failsworth, Lancashire, but resigned his orders on conscientious grounds. He moved to London in 1806 on the understanding that he would be appointed private secretary to the Earl of Lauderdale, who was to become Governor General of India. That position did not materialise, however, and Stevenson was nominated Keeper of the Treasury Records.

His wife, Elizabeth Holland, came from a family established in Lancashire and Cheshire that was connected with other prominent Unitarian families, including the Wedgwoods, the Martineaus, the Turners and the Darwins. When she died 13 months after giving birth to Gaskell,[3] her husband sent the baby to live with Elizabeth's sister, Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, Cheshire.[4]

Much of Elizabeth's childhood was spent in Cheshire, where she lived with her aunt Hannah Lumb in Knutsford, the town she immortalized as Cranford. They lived in a large red-brick house called The Heath (now Heathwaite).[7][8] Elizabeth grew to be a beautiful young woman, well-groomed, tidily dressed, kind, gentle, and considerate of others. Her temperament was calm and collected, joyous and innocent, she revelled in the simplicity of rural life.[9]

From 1821 to 1826 she attended a school in Warwickshire run by the Misses Byerley, first at Barford and from 1824 at Avonbank outside Stratford-on-Avon,[3] where she received the traditional education in arts, the classics, decorum and propriety given to young ladies from relatively wealthy families at the time. Her aunts gave her the classics to read, and she was encouraged by her father in her studies and writing. Her brother John sent her modern books, and descriptions of his life at sea and his experiences abroad.[10]

After leaving school at the age of 16, Elizabeth travelled to London to spend time with her Holland cousins.[10] She also spent some time in Newcastle upon Tyne (with the Rev William Turner's family) and from there made the journey to Edinburgh. Her stepmother's brother was the miniature artist William John Thomson, who in 1832 painted her portrait (see top right). A bust was sculpted by David Dunbar at the same time.

On 30 August 1832 Elizabeth married Unitarian minister William Gaskell, in Knutsford. They spent their honeymoon in North Wales, staying with her uncle, Samuel Holland, at Plas-yn-Penrhyn near Porthmadog.[11] The Gaskells then settled in Manchester, where William was the minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel and longest-serving Chair of the Portico Library. Manchester's industrial surroundings and books borrowed from the library influenced Elizabeth's writing in the industrial genre. Their first daughter was stillborn in 1833. Their other children were Marianne (1834), Margaret Emily, known as Meta (1837), Florence Elizabeth (1842), and Julia Bradford (1846). Marianne and Meta boarded at the private school conducted by Rachel Martineau, sister of Harriet, a close friend of Elizabeth.[12] Florence married Charles Crompton, a barrister and Liberal politician, in 1863.[3]

In March 1835 Gaskell began a diary documenting the development of her daughter Marianne: she explored parenthood, the values she placed on her role as a mother; her faith, and, later, relations between Marianne and her sister, Meta. In 1836 she co-authored with her husband a cycle of poems, Sketches among the Poor, which was published in Blackwood's Magazine in January 1837. In 1840 William Howitt published Visits to Remarkable Places containing a contribution entitled Clopton Hall by "A Lady", the first work written and published solely by her. In April 1840 Howitt published The Rural Life of England, which included a second work titled Notes on Cheshire Customs.[3]

In July 1841, the Gaskells travelled to Belgium and Germany. German literature came to have a strong influence on her short stories, the first of which she published in 1847 as Libbie Marsh's Three Eras, in Howitt's Journal, under the pseudonym "Cotton Mather Mills". But other influences including Adam Smith's Social Politics enabled a much wider understanding of the cultural milieu in which her works were set. Her second story printed under the pseudonym was The Sexton's Hero. And she made her last use of it in 1848, with the publication of her story Christmas Storms and Sunshine.[citation needed]

For some 20 years beginning in 1843, the Gaskells took holidays at Silverdale on Morecambe Bay, and in particular stayed at Lindeth Tower.[13][14] Daughters Meta and Julia later built a house, "The Shieling", in Silverdale.[15]

A son, William, (1844–45), died in infancy, and this tragedy was the catalyst for Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton. It was ready for publication in October 1848,[3] shortly before they made the move south. It was an enormous success, selling thousands of copies. Ritchie called it a "great and remarkable sensation." It was praised by Thomas Carlyle and Maria Edgeworth. She brought the teeming slums of manufacturing in Manchester alive to readers as yet unacquainted with crowded narrow alleyways. Her obvious depth of feeling was evident, while her turn of phrase and description was described as the greatest since Jane Austen.[16]

In 1850, the Gaskells moved to a villa at 84 Plymouth Grove.[17] She took her cow with her. For exercise, she would happily walk three miles to help another person in distress. In Manchester, Elizabeth wrote her remaining literary works, while her husband held welfare committees and tutored the poor in his study. The Gaskells' social circle included writers, journalists, religious dissenters, and social reformers such as William and Mary Howitt and Harriet Martineau. Poets, patrons of literature and writers such as Lord Houghton, Charles Dickens and John Ruskin visited Plymouth Grove, as did the American writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Eliot Norton, while the conductor Charles Hallé, who lived close by, taught piano to one of their daughters. Elizabeth's friend Charlotte Brontë stayed there three times, and on one occasion hid behind the drawing room curtains as she was too shy to meet the Gaskells' other visitors.

In early 1850 Gaskell wrote to Charles Dickens asking for advice about assisting a girl named Pasley whom she had visited in prison. Pasley provided her with a model for the title character of Ruth in 1853. Lizzie Leigh was published in March and April 1850, in the first numbers of Dickens's journal Household Words, in which many of her works were to be published, including Cranford and North and South, her novella My Lady Ludlow, and short stories.[citation needed]

In June 1855, Patrick Brontë asked Gaskell to write a biography of his daughter Charlotte, and The Life of Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857. This played a significant role in developing Gaskell's own literary career.[3] In the biography, Gaskell chose to focus more on Brontë as a woman than as a writer of Romantic fiction.[20] In 1859 Gaskell travelled to Whitby to gather material for Sylvia's Lovers, which was published in 1863. Her novella Cousin Phyllis was serialized in The Cornhill Magazine from November 1863 to February 1864. The serialization of her last novel, Wives and Daughters, began in August 1864 in The Cornhill.[3] She died of a heart attack in 1865, while visiting a house she had purchased in Holybourne, Hampshire. Wives and Daughters was published in book form in early 1866, first in the United States and then, ten days later, in Britain.[3]

Her grave is near the Brook Street Chapel, Knutsford.

Even though her writing conforms to Victorian conventions, including the use of the name "Mrs. Gaskell", she usually framed her stories as critiques of contemporary attitudes. Her early works were highly influenced by the social analysis of Thomas Carlyle and focused on factory work in the Midlands.[27] She usually emphasized the role of women, with complex narratives and realistic female characters.[28] Gaskell was influenced by the writings of Jane Austen, especially in North and South, which borrows liberally from the courtship plot of Pride and Prejudice.[29] She was an established novelist when Patrick Brontë invited her to write a biography of his daughter, though she worried, as a writer of fiction, that it would be "a difficult thing" to "be accurate and keep to the facts."[30] Her treatment of class continues to interest social historians as well as fiction readers.

Ruth is one of several 19th-century British and American novels that cast a "fallen woman" with an illegitimate child in the role of heroine. It may be compared to Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), published just a few years earlier, and in many respects it anticipates Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). It was controversial for its time.

You can read about Elizabeth Gaskell during the year that Ruth was published in this Blog from the Elizabeth Gaskell House. Also mentioned are some of the other Victorian events occurring during the year of 1853.

https://elizabethgaskellhouse.co.uk/i...

Trev wrote: "You can read about Elizabeth Gaskell during the year that Ruth was published in this Blog from the Elizabeth Gaskell House. Also mentioned are some of the other Victorian events occur..."

Thanks Trev. It was informative and fun

Thank you, Trev, for the context!

Very interesting, thanks Trev!

I hadn’t realized Mrs. Gaskell had written so few novels.