Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born in 1810 in London but raised by her aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire, the village that would later inspire Cranford. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister in Manchester, where she lived for the rest of her life and witnessed firsthand the conditions of industrial working-class life that would fuel her fiction. The death of her infant son in 1845 prompted her to begin writing as a form of consolation, and her first novel, Mary Barton, published in 1848, brought immediate attention for its sympathetic portrayal of Manchester's laboring poor. Charles Dickens admired her work and serialized several of her novels, including North and South, in his magazine Household Words. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by North and South.