Elizabeth Gaskell was born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson in 1810. The daughter of a Unitarian, who was a civil servant and journalist, she was brought up after her mother's death by her aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire, which became the model not only for Cranford but also for Hollingford (in Wives and Daughters). In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister in Manchester, with whom she lived very happily.
Her first novel, Mary Barton, published in 1848, was immensely popular and brought her to the attention of Charles Dickens, who was looking for contributors to his new periodical, Household Words, for which she wrote the famous series of papers subsequently reprinted as Cranford. Her later novels include Ruth (1843), North and South (1854-5), Sylvia's Lovers (1863), and Wives and Daughters (1864-6).
She also wrote many stories and her remarkable Life of Charlotte Brontë. She died in 1865. Angus Easson is Professor of English at the University of Salford. He has edited Gaskell's North and South, Cousin Phillis and Other Tales, Wives and Daughters, and The Life of Charlotte Brontë for the Oxford World's Classics. He has published a study of Elizabeth Gaskell and edited the Gaskell volume in the Critical Heritage series.
Sally Shuttleworth is Head of Humanities at the University of Oxford. She is author of George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science and Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, and co-editor, with Jenny Taylor, of Embodied Selves : an Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830-1890. She is the editor of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre for Oxford World's Classics.
Her first novel, Mary Barton, published in 1848, was immensely popular and brought her to the attention of Charles Dickens, who was looking for contributors to his new periodical, Household Words, for which she wrote the famous series of papers subsequently reprinted as Cranford. Her later novels include Ruth (1843), North and South (1854-5), Sylvia's Lovers (1863), and Wives and Daughters (1864-6).
She also wrote many stories and her remarkable Life of Charlotte Brontë. She died in 1865. Angus Easson is Professor of English at the University of Salford. He has edited Gaskell's North and South, Cousin Phillis and Other Tales, Wives and Daughters, and The Life of Charlotte Brontë for the Oxford World's Classics. He has published a study of Elizabeth Gaskell and edited the Gaskell volume in the Critical Heritage series.
Sally Shuttleworth is Head of Humanities at the University of Oxford. She is author of George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science and Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, and co-editor, with Jenny Taylor, of Embodied Selves : an Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830-1890. She is the editor of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre for Oxford World's Classics.
