CRANFORD/COUSIN PHILLIS

ELIZABETH CLEGHORN GASKELL was born in London in 1810, but she spent her formative years in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon and the north of England. In 1832 she married the Reverend William Gaskell, who became well known as the minister of the Unitarian Chapel in Manchester’s Cross Street. For sixteen years she bore children, worked among the poor, travelled and, latterly, began to write. In 1848 Mary Barton was her first success. Two years later she began writing for Dickens’s magazine, Household Words, to which she contributed fiction for the next thirteen years; her most notable work being another industrial novel, North and South (1855). In 1850 she met Charlotte Brontë, who became a life-long friend. Afer Charlotte’s death she was chosen by Patrick Brontë to write The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), a probing and sympathetic account of this great Victorian novelist. Elizabeth Gaskell’s position as a clergyman’s wife and as a successful writer introduced her to a wide circle of friends, both from the professional world of Manchester and from the larger literary world. Her output was substantial and completely professional. Dickens discovered her resilient strength of character when trying to impose his views on her as editor of Household Words. She proved that she was not to be bullied, even by a man of such genius as he. Her later works, Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), Cousin Phillis (1864) and Wives and Daughters (1866) reveal developments in new literary directions. Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly in November 1865.

PETER KEATING was Reader in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh until 1990 when he took early retirement. His books include The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (1971), Into Unknown England (1976), The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1876–1914 (1989) and Kipling The Poet (1994). In addition to Cranford and Cousin Phillis (1976), he has also edited for Penguin Matthew Arnold: Selected Prose (1971) and Rudyard Kipling: Selected Poems (1993); and for Oxford University Press, Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan (1998).