Essential Novelists - Elizabeth Gaskell. Elizabeth Gaskell
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Author
ELIZABETH CLEGHORN Gaskell (born Sept. 29, 1810, Chelsea, London, Eng.—died Nov. 12, 1865, near Alton, Hampshire), English novelist, short-story writer, and first biographer of Charlotte Brontë.
She was a daughter of a Unitarian minister. When her mother died, she was brought up by a maternal aunt in the Cheshire village of Knutsford in a kindly atmosphere of rural gentility that was already old-fashioned at the time. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister, and settled in the overcrowded, problem-ridden industrial city of Manchester, which remained her home for the rest of her life. Domestic life—the Gaskells had six children, of whom four daughters lived to adulthood—and the social and charitable obligations of a minister’s wife claimed her time but not all her thoughts. She did not begin her literary career until middle life, when the death of her only son had intensified her sense of community with the poor and her desire to “give utterance” to their “agony.” Her first novel, Mary Barton, reflects the temper of Manchester in the late 1830s. It is the story of a working-class family in which the father, John Barton, lapses into bitter class hatred during a cyclic depression and carries out a retaliatory murder at the behest of his trade union. Its timely appearance in the revolutionary year of 1848 brought the novel immediate success, and it won the praise of Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle. Dickens invited her to contribute to his magazine, Household Words, where her next major work, Cranford (1853), appeared. This social history of a gentler era, which describes, without sentimentalizing or satirizing, her girlhood village of Knutsford and the efforts of its shabby-genteel inhabitants to keep up appearances, has remained her most popular work.
The conflict between Mrs. Gaskell’s sympathetic understanding and the strictures of Victorian morality resulted in a mixed reception for her next social novel, Ruth (1853). It offered an alternative to the seduced girl’s traditional progress to prostitution and an early grave.
Among the many friends attracted by Mrs. Gaskell was Charlotte Brontë, who died in 1855 and whose biography Charlotte’s father, Patrick Brontë, urged her to write. The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), written with warmhearted admiration, disposed of a mass of firsthand material with unforced narrative skill. It is at once a work of art and a well-documented interpretation of its subject.
Among her later works, Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), dealing with the impact of the Napoleonic Wars upon simple people, is notable. Her last and longest work, Wives and Daughters (1864–66), concerning the interlocking fortunes of two or three country families, is considered by many her finest. It was left unfinished at her death.
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North and South
Chapter I
'Haste To The Wedding'
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'WOOED AND MARRIED AND a'.'
'Edith!' said Margaret, gently, 'Edith!'
But, as Margaret half suspected, Edith had fallen asleep. She lay curled up on the sofa in the back drawing-room in Harley Street, looking very lovely in her white muslin and blue ribbons. If Titania had ever been dressed in white muslin and blue ribbons, and had fallen asleep on a crimson damask sofa in a back drawing-room, Edith might have been taken for her. Margaret was struck afresh by her cousin's beauty. They had grown up together from childhood, and all along Edith had been remarked upon by every one, except Margaret, for her prettiness; but Margaret had never thought about it until the last few days, when the prospect of soon losing her companion seemed to give force to every sweet quality and charm which Edith possessed. They had been talking about wedding dresses, and wedding ceremonies; and Captain Lennox, and what he had told Edith about her future life at Corfu, where his regiment was stationed; and the difficulty of keeping a piano in good tune (a difficulty which Edith seemed to consider as one of the most formidable that could befall her in her married life), and what gowns she should want in the visits to Scotland, which would immediately succeed her marriage; but the whispered tone had latterly become more drowsy; and Margaret, after a pause of a few minutes, found, as she fancied, that in spite of the buzz in the next room, Edith had rolled herself up into a soft ball of muslin and ribbon, and silken curls, and gone off into a peaceful little after-dinner nap.
Margaret had been on the point of telling her cousin of some of the plans and visions which she entertained as to her future life in the country parsonage, where her father and mother lived; and where her