Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born on 29 September 1810 in Chelsea, London. Her mother died thirteen months later, and her father sent the baby to live with her aunt, Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, Cheshire. Knutsford became the model for her Cranford. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister, and they moved to Manchester, where he was minister at Cross Street Chapel. After their infant son died in 1845, she wrote her first novel, Mary Barton (1848). It is a story of Manchester’s working poor, and its success made her famous almost at once.

Charles Dickens invited her to write for his new weekly, Household Words, and her “Lizzie Leigh” ran in its first numbers in 1850. Cranford and North and South were also serialized there. Her friend Charlotte Brontë stayed with the Gaskells in Manchester, and after Brontë’s death Gaskell wrote The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). Her later books include Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), Cousin Phillis and Wives and Daughters. She died of a heart attack on 12 November 1865, while visiting a house she had bought in Holybourne, Hampshire. Wives and Daughters was still unfinished.

She loved telling ghost stories. Her first, The Old Nurse's Story, was written for Dickens’s Christmas number of 1852. An old servant tells the children in her care what happened the winter she took their orphaned mother to an old house on the Northumberland fells. Dickens argued with her about the ending. The story is still in print, among other places as one of Penguin’s Little Black Classics.