Author · 23 titles

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) widened the Victorian novel's moral imagination. Published by Dickens in Household Words and admired by contemporaries from Ruskin to George Eliot, she wrote fiction that refused to look away from social suffering — child labour, class division, the hidden cost of industrial progress — while never losing warmth or narrative pleasure. North and South and Mary Barton made Manchester as vital a literary landscape as Dickens's London; Cranford and Wives and Daughters showed her gift for character and domestic comedy at its most subtle. A biographer, short-story writer, and trusted voice of her age, Mrs Gaskell remains essential reading for anyone seeking the human heart of nineteenth-century England.

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