Elizabeth Gaskell author page

Elizabeth Gaskell biography

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson) was an English novelist, short-story writer and biographer. She was born in Chelsea, London, on 29 September 1810, daughter of William Stevenson and Elizabeth Holland.

After her mother’s death, Elizabeth spent much of her childhood in Knutsford, Cheshire, in the care of her maternal aunt, Hannah Lumb. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister, and the couple settled in Manchester, where industrial society provided much of her future material.

Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848 and addresses the lives of working-class people in industrial Manchester. She followed with works including Cranford, North and South and Wives and Daughters, which combined social observation, moral questions and attention to domestic life.

Beyond fiction, she wrote the first biography of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857. That work attracted both praise and criticism for its personal interpretation. Gaskell also published shorter works and ghost stories such as “The Poor Clare,” first serialized in 1856 in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words.

Her later novel Wives and Daughters was serialized from 1864 into 1866; she died before seeing its complete publication. Gaskell died on 12 November 1865 in Holybourne, Hampshire.