Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote the first English novel to take an industrial strike seriously from both sides, and then wrote the biography of Charlotte Bronte that had to be withdrawn for libel. She was a Unitarian minister's wife in Manchester, began writing after the death of her infant son, and published Mary Barton anonymously in 1848 - a novel about a working-class family in the hungry forties whose mill-owners complained loudly that it was unfair to them. Dickens serialised her afterwards. North and South set a southern clergyman's daughter against a Manchester manufacturer and gave him arguments as good as hers, which is why it is still the industrial novel that gets taught. Cranford, gentler and funnier, is about a village of women managing on very little. Ruth took an unmarried mother as its heroine and treated her as redeemable, and was burned by members of her husband's congregation. The Life of Charlotte Bronte, written at Patrick Bronte's request, is the source of most of what is believed about that family; passages about Branwell and a married woman brought threats of legal action and were cut from the third edition. She died suddenly at fifty-five, mid-sentence in a novel. Wives and Daughters was running in the Cornhill Magazine when she died and the editor finished it with a note explaining what was to have happened. She bought a house in Hampshire secretly, intending it as a surprise for her husband, and died there of a heart attack a few weeks later without telling him. Charlotte Bronte had stayed with her in Manchester and the friendship was real, which is both the strength and the problem of the biography. Her ghost stories were written for Dickens s Christmas numbers. Her reputation fell for eighty years and was rebuilt from the 1950s onward.

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