Elizabeth Gaskell

[Gem , Moderator]

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, (née Stevenson) and often referred to as Mrs. Gaskell was born on September 29, 1810 in Lindsey Row, Chelsea, at the house which is now 93 Cheyne Walk. She was the youngest of eight children; only she and her brother John survived infancy. Her father, William Stevenson, a Unitarian from Berwick-upon-Tweed, was minister at Failsworth, Lancashire, but resigned his orders on conscientious grounds; he moved to London in 1806 with the intention of going to India after he was appointed private secretary to the Earl of Lauderdale, who was to become Governor General of India. That position did not materialize, however, and instead, Stevenson was nominated Keeper of the Treasury Records.

His wife, Elizabeth Holland, came from a family from the English Midlands that was connected with other prominent Unitarian families. When she died 13 months after giving birth to her youngest daughter, she left a bewildered husband who saw no alternative for Elizabeth but to be sent to live with her mother's sister, Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, Cheshire. While she was growing up, Elizabeth's future was uncertain, as she had no personal wealth and no firm home, though she was a permanent guest at her aunt and grandparents' house.

Her father remarried to Catherine Thomson in 1814. They had a son, William, in 1815, and a daughter, Catherine in 1816. Although Elizabeth spent several years without seeing her father, to whom she was devoted, her older brother John often visited her in Knutsford. John was destined for the Royal Navy from an early age, like his grandfathers and uncles, but he did not obtain preferment into the Service and had to join the Merchant Navy with the East India Company's fleet. John went missing in 1827 during an expedition to India.

A beautiful young woman, Elizabeth was well-groomed, tidily dressed, kind, gentle and considerate of others. Her temperament was calm and collected, joyous and innocent, she revealed in the simplicity of rural life. Much of Elizabeth's childhood was spent in Cheshire, where she lived with her aunt Hannah Lumb in Knutsford, the town she immortalized as Cranford. They lived in a large red-brick house called "Sandlebridge" that overlooked the township of Alderley Edge. From 1821 to 1826 she attended a school run by the Miss Byerleys at Barford House, and after that Avonbank in Stratford-on-Avon, where she received the traditional education in arts, the classics, decorum and propriety given to young ladies at the time. Her aunts gave her the classics to read, and she was encouraged by her father in her studies and writing. Her brother John sent her modern books, and descriptions of his life at sea and his experiences abroad.

However, she was unhappy at Sandlebridge. Seeking new experiences, she opened her mind to the solace of nature, finding company in the silence of the heath. On other occasions when her cousins came to play, she found consolation in young friendships. Exploring the green hollows, old shady glades of ruined cottages, she collected wildflowers and watched the singing birds. The pleasure natural things brought reflected clearly in her literary observations.

Sandlebridge would be demolished before 1900, only its chimney remaining.

On August 30, 1832, Elizabeth married a Unitarian minister, William Gaskell, in Knutsford. They spent their honeymoon in North Wales, staying with her uncle, Samuel Holland, near Porthmadog. The Gaskells then settled in Manchester, where William was the minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel. Manchester's industrial surroundings influenced Elizabeth's writing in the industrial genre. Their first child, a daughter, was stillborn in 1833. A son, William, (1844–45), died in infancy, and this tragedy was the catalyst for Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton. Their other children were Marianne (1834), Margaret Emily, known as Meta (1837), Florence Elizabeth (1842), and Julia Bradford (1846). Marianne and Meta boarded at the private school conducted by Rachel Martineau, sister of Harriet, a close friend of Elizabeth. Florence married Charles Crompton, a barrister and Liberal politician, in 1863.

In March 1835 Gaskell began a diary documenting the development of her daughter Marianne: she explored parenthood, the values she placed on her role as a mother; her faith, and, later, relations between Marianne and her sister, Meta. In 1836 she co-authored with her husband a cycle of poems, Sketches among the Poor, which was published in Blackwood's Magazine in January 1837. In 1840 William Howitt published Visits to Remarkable Places containing a contribution entitled Clopton Hall by "A Lady", the first work written and published solely by her. In April 1840 Howitt published The Rural Life of England, which included a second work titled Notes on Cheshire Customs.

In July 1841 the Gaskells traveled to Belgium and Germany. German literature came to have a strong influence on her short stories, the first of which she published in 1847 as Libbie Marsh's Three Eras, in Howitt's Journal, under the pseudonym "Cotton Mather Mills". But other influences including Adam Smith's Social Politics enabled a much wider understanding of the cultural milieu in which her works were set. Her second story printed under the pseudonym was The Sexton's Hero. And she made her last use of it in 1848, with the publication of her story Christmas Storms and Sunshine.

She began writing her first novel to escape the grief of losing her only son. Mary Barton was ready for publication in October 1848 shortly before they made the move south. It was an enormous success, selling thousands of copies. Ritchie called it a "great and remarkable sensation." It was praised by Thomas Carlyle and Maria Edgeworth. She brought the teeming slums of manufacturing in Manchester alive to readers as yet unacquainted with crowded narrow alleyways. Her obvious depth of feeling was evident, while her turn of phrase and description was described as the greatest since Jane Austen.

In 1850 the Gaskells moved to a villa at 84 Plymouth Grove. She took her cow with her. For exercise, she would happily walk three miles to help another person in distress. In Manchester, Elizabeth wrote her remaining literary works, while her husband held welfare committees and tutored the poor in his study. The Gaskells' social circle included writers, journalists, religious dissenters and social reformers such as William and Mary Howitt and Harriet Martineau. Poets, patrons of literature and writers such as Lord Houghton, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin visited Plymouth Grove, as did the American writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Eliot Norton, while the conductor Charles Hallé, who lived close by, taught piano to one of their daughters. Elizabeth's close friend Charlotte Brontë stayed there three times, and on one occasion hid behind the drawing room curtains as she was too shy to meet the Gaskells' other visitors.

In early 1850 Gaskell wrote to Charles Dickens asking for advice about assisting a girl named Pasley whom she had visited in prison. Pasley provided her with a model for the title character of Ruth in 1853. Lizzie Leigh was published in March and April 1850, in the first numbers of Dickens's journal Household Words, in which many of her works were to be published, including Cranford and North and South, her novella My Lady Ludlow, and short stories.

In June 1855 Patrick Brontë asked Gaskell to write a biography of his daughter Charlotte, and The Life of Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857. This played a significant role in developing Gaskell's own literary career. In the biography, Gaskell chose to focus more on Brontë as a woman than as a writer of Romantic fiction. In 1859 Gaskell traveled to Whitby to gather material for Sylvia's Lovers, which was published in 1863. Her novella Cousin Phyllis was serialized in The Cornhill Magazine from November 1863 to February 1864. The serialization of her last novel, Wives and Daughters, began in August 1864 in The Cornhill.] She died of a heart attack on November 12, 1865, while visiting a house she had purchased in Holybourne, Hampshire. Wives and Daughters was published in book form in early 1866, first in the United States and then, ten days later, in Britain. (from wikipedia)

Additional Reading

The Gaskell Society

Dictionary of
Unitarian & Universalist Biography

Five Interesting Facts about Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell: Charlotte Brontë's unlikely defender against prurient gossip

[Deborah, Moderator]

Moving this information to the top for the upcoming January book - Sylvia’s Lovers