Elizabeth Gaskell
English novelist, biographer, and short story writer
1810 CE to 1865 CE
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson; September 29, 1810 – November 12, 1865), often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, is an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer.
Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor, and are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature.
Her first novel, Mary Barton, is published in 1848.
Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, is the first biography of Brontë.
In this biography, she only writes of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë’s life, the rest she leaves out, deciding that certain, more salacious aspects are better kept hidden.
Among Gaskell's best known novels are Cranford (1851–53), North and South (1854–55), and Wives and Daughters (1865).
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The story is set in the English city of Manchester between 1839 and 1842, and deals with the difficulties faced by the Victorian working class.
Charles Dickens publishes his tenth novel, Hard Times, in 1854, beginning serialization in his magazine, Household Words, on April 1; he had begun writing it on January 3.
Hard Times is one of a number of state-of-the-nation novels published in England around the same time, another being North and South by Dickens’s friend Elizabeth Gaskell, which aims to highlight the social and economic pressures that some people are experiencing.
The novel is unusual in that it is not set in London as was Dickens' wont, but in the fictitious Victorian industrial town of Coketown.