Gaskell, Elizabeth (redirected from Mrs. Gaskell)

Gaskell, Elizabeth (Cleghorn)

 orig. Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson known as Mrs. Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell, chalk drawing by George Richmond, 1851; in the National Portrait Gallery, London

(credit: Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London)

(born Sept. 29, 1810, Chelsea, London, Eng.—died Nov. 12, 1865, near Alton, Hampshire) British writer. The daughter of a Unitarian minister, Gaskell also married a Unitarian minister and began writing in middle age. Cranford (1853), her most popular novel, and the unfinished Wives and Daughters (1864–66), perhaps her best, are about the lives of country villagers. Mary Barton (1848), Ruth (1853), and North and South (1855) examine social problems of the urban working class. In 1857 she wrote the first biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë (see Brontë sisters).

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Gaskell, Elizabeth 

Born Sept. 29, 1810, in London; died Nov. 12, 1865, in Holybourne, Hampshire. English author.

Gaskell’s first major work was the social novel Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848; Russian translation, 1860), which showed how hunger and poverty can lead the working people to thoughts of insurrection. Gaskell was the first English novelist to work with the theme of the Chartist struggle. The novel Cranford (1853) depicts the life of the small-town provincial. In the novel Ruth (1853), the story of a female worker who refuses to marry the “gentleman” who had seduced her is treated with respect, but religious and sentimental tendencies are intensified in North and South (1855). However, in both Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) and Wives and Daughters (1866; unfinished), one can find realistic passages. Gaskell also wrote a biography of Charlotte Brontë (vols. 1-2, 1857). Karl Marx placed Gaskell, along with Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, among the “brilliant pleiad of English novelists…” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 10, p. 648).

WORKS

Works, vols. 1-8. Edited by A. W. Ward. [London] 1907.
Letters. [Manchester, 1966.]
In Russian translation:
Sever i Iug. Moscow, 1857.
Ruf. In Vremia, 1863, no. 4. (Unfinished.)
Gorodok Krenford. St. Petersburg, 1867.
Zheny i docheri. In Otechestvennye zapiski, 1867, vols. 171-75.
Meri Barton. [Introduction by A. Elistratova] Moscow, 1963.

REFERENCES

Shiller, F. P. “Elizaveta Gaskel’.” Iz istorii realizma XIX v. na Zapade. Moscow, 1934.
Istoriia angliiskoi literatury, vol. 2, part 2. Moscow, 1955.
Grossman, L. “Dostoevskii i chartistskii roman.” Voprosy literatury, 1959, no. 4.
Hopkins, A. B. Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and Work. London [1952].
Pollard, A. Mrs. Gaskell: Novelist and Biographer. Cambridge, Mass., 1966.

I. M. KATARSKII