September 2010 is the bicentenary of Gaskell's birth. This tender story of parents, children and step-children, mistakes and secrets was Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel and is considered her masterpiece.
Elizabeth Gaskell was born on 29 September 1810 in London. She was brought up in Knutsford, Cheshire by her aunt after her mother died when she was two years old. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, who was a Unitarian minister like her father. After their marriage they lived in Manchester with their children. Elizabeth Gaskell published her first novel, Mary Barton, in 1848 to great success. She went on to publish much of her work in Charles Dickens's magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round. Along with short stories and a biography of Charlotte Bronte, she published five more novels including North and South (1855) and Wives and Daughters (1866). Wives and Daughters is unfinished as Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly of heart failure on 12 November 1865.
She was a pioneer, multi-tasking mother... Gaskell's work will
always be one of the adornments of liberal Britain
*Guardian*
My dear Scheherazade...I am sure your powers of narrative can never
be exhausted in a single night, but must be good for at least a
thousand nights and one
*Charles Dickens*
Her stories are wonderfully funny, but the ridiculous is bathed in
a poignant, dreamlike mood found nowhere else in fiction, and
profound ideas and strong values sleep beneath everyday details of
bonnets and cakes
*Jenny Uglow*
People who read her always come away surprised at how modern she
sounds. You don't have to think yourself into her century in order
to sympathise, since her guiding principle was no more or less than
a sense of practical, day-today justice, totally outside the
abiding gentleman-lady-peasant-donkey-peasant's wife hierarchy
which surrounded her
*Evening Standard*
Pah! to Dickens. Eat your heart out, Little Nell. That Elizabeth
Gaskell could write a death scene to make your socks melt
*Scotsman*
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