Elizabeth Gaskell

British · 1810 to 1865

Born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson on September 29, 1810, at Lindsey Row in Chelsea, London, the youngest of eight children of whom only she and her brother John survived infancy, she lost her Unitarian mother before her first birthday and was sent north to her aunt Hannah Lumb in Knutsford, Cheshire. That small market town, with its widows and its tea-drinking and its slow news from London, would later become Cranford. Her brother John, a merchant sailor with the East India Company, went missing on a voyage in 1827 and never returned. She was educated at the Misses Byerley's school near Stratford-upon-Avon. In 1832 she married the Unitarian minister William Gaskell and settled with him in industrial Manchester, raising five children and grieving the death of her infant son Willie in 1845. Her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), drew on the lives of the Manchester poor and was published anonymously; Dickens, recognising a kindred social conscience, recruited her for his magazine Household Words, in which Cranford was serialised between 1851 and 1853. North and South (1855) set a southern parson's daughter against a Lancashire mill owner. She befriended Charlotte Brontë on a visit to Haworth, and after Brontë's death in 1855 wrote The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), a biography so candid about the Brontë father and his unhappy parishioners that two libel threats forced its withdrawal and a revised second edition. She died of a heart attack on November 12, 1865, while taking tea in a house she had secretly purchased at Holybourne in Hampshire as a future surprise for her overworked husband, her last novel Wives and Daughters unfinished by a few pages.