ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810-1865)
Article contributed by
Josie Billington,
University of Liverpool
Born in London on 29
September, 1810, Elizabeth Gaskell grew up in the early decades of the nineteenth
century in rural Cheshire and despite her reputation as a writer of industrial
fiction it was the older, pre-urban world of her childhood which provided the
setting and stimulus for her finest and most mature work. She was brought up in
the care of her maternal family, the Hollands, her mother, Elizabeth, having
died when she was 13 months old. An old-established Cheshire family, the
Hollands were typical of the Unitarian tradition and faith to which they
belonged: solidly middle-class (they were widely represented in the professions
of law, medicine, farming, banking and business, and connected through
friendship and marriage to the Wedgwoods, the Turners, and the Darwins), their
outlook was politically liberal and religiously tolerant. This extensive family
life provided Elizabeth with a range of loving and dependable father—, mother—
and sibling-surrogates, to whom she remained deeply loyal for the remainder of
her life. Her own father, William Stevenson, also a Unitarian, though of more
radical, free-thinking stock, had remarried when Elizabeth was four, and whilst
Elizabeth continued to visit him, the antipathy which existed between herself
and her stepmother (now with two children of her own) meant that Elizabeth's
experience of the paternal home was a deeply unhappy one. Her relationship with
her own brother, John, however (12 years her senior, and brought up with her
father), was a profoundly loving, satisfying and nurturing one. His death (at
sea) was part of a pattern of personal loss and necessary acceptance which
would find its way, implicitly and indirectly, into Elizabeth's later fiction.
Elizabeth's Unitarian
heritage (which set the education of girls as highly as that of boys) meant
that her education, whilst old-fashioned in some respects, went beyond the mere
acquisition of accomplishments which constituted the schooling of many of her
female contemporaries. Her early education, under the direction of her aunts,
encouraged Elizabeth to read widely and to think and judge for herself, and her
later formal schooling, at a boarding-school in Warwickshire, was organised
along similarly liberal lines. Moreover, the wide Unitarian network, with
professional and learned connections from London to Newcastle, meant that
Elizabeth was well-travelled and socially adept, rather than provincial in
outlook, by the time she reached young womanhood.
It was on a visit to
Unitarian acquaintances in Manchester that Elizabeth met her future husband
William Gaskell. As classical scholar, Unitarian minister, university lecturer,
and teacher of working men, William combined those qualities of learning and
active social conscience which Elizabeth's upbringing had disposed her to value
most. In the early years of her marriage, Elizabeth joined William in his social
and educational work, teaching Sunday school and evening
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Works by Elizabeth Gaskell
Works and Events 1848 - 1865
Academic year 2009/2010
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Natalia Quintana Morán
naquinmo@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press
Literay Encyclopedia: Elizabeth Gaskell
19 Septiembre de 2009, 18:03
copyright © The Literary Dictionary
Company Limited
URL: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1699
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