Elizabeth Gaskell was hostile to any form of biographical notice of her being written. Only months before her death, she responded to an applicant, “I disapprove so entirely of the plan of writing ‘notices’ or ‘memoirs’ of living people, that I must send you … an entire refusal to sanction what is to me so objectionable and indelicate a practice, by furnishing a single fact with regard to myself.” (4 June 1865). [1]
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson) was born in London on 29 September 1810. Often just referred to as Mrs Gaskell, she was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her writing illuminated the plight of the working class people.
Gaskell was the daughter of a Unitarian minister and the youngest of eight children. Worn out by childbearing and the deaths of her babies, her mother died at age 40, when her baby was only one year old. William Stevenson felt unable to care for a daughter and so she was brought up by her aunt, Hannah Lumb.
The young Elizabeth was pretty, vivacious, intensely social, and charming. In 1831 she met a Unitarian minister, William Gaskell and they fell in love. They married in 1832 and settled in the city of Manchester.
Gaskell’s literary career did not begin until the middle of her life, when her adored nine-month-old only son died from scarlet fever. Her husband thought writing a book might take her mind off her terrible grief and encouraged her to concentrate on her writing and begin a novel. The result was Mary Barton, published in 1848, which told about the desperate poverty of those living in industrial cities like Manchester.
Her name as a writer was quickly made and soon Dickens was asking her for contributions to his magazines. The best known of her novels are Cranford (1853), North and South (1854), and Wives and Daughters (1865). In 1850 she met Charlotte Brontë and the two women became friends. After Charlotte’s death in 1855 Gaskell wrote The Life of Charlotte Brontë at the request of Patrick Brontë. It remains a classic biography to this day.
Elizabeth Gaskell was one of the most famous female authors of Victorian England. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of Victorian society, including the very poor. She died of a heart attack in November 1865, aged 55.