{\b Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell}.

{\b Date of Birth}.: 29 September 1810

{\b Date of Death}.: 12 November 1865

{\b Works}.

English novelist and biographer, her best known novels are Cranford (1853) and 
the unfinished Wives and Daughters (1966). Her The Life of Charlotte Bronte 
(1857) was the first biography of her friend. She also wrote a number of other 
novels including Mary Barton (1848), Ruth (1853), North and South (1855) and 
Sylvia's Lovers (1863).

{\b Featured Works}.

Cranford.

{\b General Comment}.

The daughter of a Unitarian minister and civil servant, William Stevenson, 
Elizabeth Gaskell was brought up after her mother's early death by her kindly, 
old-fashioned aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire.

In 1932 she married Unitarian minister and pamphlet writer William Gaskell, 
who held a chair in English History and Literature at Manchester New College, 
where Elizabeth lived for the rest of her life. They had four daughters and a 
son who died in infancy. To distract herself from her grief, Elizabeth wrote 
her first novel, Mary Barton, a melodramatic tale of industrial unrest 
strongly influenced by the Chartist movement of the early 1840s.

Dickens read and liked this book and most of her subsequent work was published 
in serial form in his magazine Household Words, including Cranford, a tale of 
a small town spinster and her set, not unlike her own aunt in Knutsford, a 
town which she also drew on to depict the country lives of the families in 
Wives and Daughters.

Elizabeth was an active humanitarian as well as a keen observer of character, 
and many of  her works carried a social message of the kind for reconciliation 
between workers and employers.

Her biography of Charlotte Bronte caused a scandal by its frankness, 
particularly in respect of Branwell and his relations with the lady of the 
house in which he was tutor, which almost resulted in a libel case.

Elizabeth Gaskell died of heart failure aged 55, leaving her novel Wives and 
Daughters unfinished.