Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born in Chelsea in 1810, the daughter of a Unitarian minister turned Treasury clerk. Her mother died when she was thirteen months old, and she was raised by an aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire — the small market town she would later transmute into the fictional Cranford. Unitarianism was decisive: a Dissenting tradition that valued women's education, rational inquiry, and engagement with social questions other denominations preferred not to look at. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, junior minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester, and moved to the industrial city that supplied the material for everything she wrote afterward.

Manchester in the 1830s and 1840s was the most concentrated case of industrial capitalism on earth: cotton mills, child labor, cholera, a working population that lived seven or eight years less than its rural equivalent. As a minister's wife, Gaskell visited the homes of the poor in a way few middle-class observers did, and incorporated what she heard into Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848), published anonymously the year of European revolution. The novel — which dramatizes a Chartist artisan's murder of a mill-owner's son and the moral collapse that follows — was attacked by Manchester manufacturers for partisanship and praised by Carlyle and Dickens for telling truths the official literature would not.

Dickens recruited her to his weekly Household Words, where she serialized Cranford (1851–1853), a sequence of sketches about a community of genteel-poor unmarried women that has never gone out of print, and North and South (1854–1855), a more ambitious industrial novel built around the marriage plot of the southern parson's daughter Margaret Hale and the northern mill-owner John Thornton. The working relationship with Dickens was productive and edgy; he found her late with copy and resistant to editorial pressure, calling her "Scheherazade" in correspondence with friends. Wives and Daughters, serialized in the Cornhill Magazine from 1864, is her most assured novel and was left unfinished by one chapter at her sudden death from a heart attack in November 1865.

The book that made her notorious in her lifetime was not a novel. After Charlotte Brontë's death in 1855, Patrick Brontë asked Gaskell to write the authorized life. The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) was an immediate success and an immediate scandal. Her portrait of Branwell Brontë's dissolution named his affair with Lydia Robinson, the married woman in whose household he had been tutor; Mrs Robinson threatened legal action, as did Carus Wilson, the Yorkshire schoolmaster Gaskell identified as the model for Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre. The publishers withdrew the second edition and issued a heavily revised third that softened the contested passages — a bowdlerization Gaskell privately resented but accepted. The biography established the Brontë myth (the wild moors, the doomed siblings, the parsonage at Haworth) that has shaped reception of the novels ever since.

She published as "Mrs Gaskell" for most of her career, a self-presentation the twentieth century read as deference and the twenty-first has begun to read as strategy: the minister's wife had access the professional novelist would not. She died at fifty-five, having bought a house in Hampshire she intended as a retirement gift for her husband; he was not told of the purchase. Wives and Daughters ends mid-sentence.