Elizabeth Gaskell
1810-1865
Profile
Novelist. Born in London, the daughter of
William Stevenson, a civil servant, Elizabeth was brought up in Knutsford,
Cheshire by an aunt. Her association with the West Midlands is through the five
years she spent at school in Warwickshire.
In 1822 Elizabeth was sent to a boarding school
three miles from Warwick at Barford. It was run by three
sisters who were related to Josiah Wedgwood, the prosperous Midlands pottery
manufacturer. It was a large and graceful house with spacious grounds and an
open aspect and the town and its church are alluded to in Elizabeth's later
writing. In 1824 the school moved to Avonbank, Stratford-upon-Avon, a Tudor building with literary
associations, having been owned by a cousin of William Shakespeare. The
students attended the adjacent Holy Trinity Church and Elizabeth was able to
use her knowledge of the Clopton family, derived in part from their chapel in
the church, when writing about nearby Clopton House. This became her first
published work when it was included in Visits to remarkable places
(1840) by William Howitt.
Following her formal education she went to live
for two years in Newcastle-upon-Tyne at the home of a distant cousin before
moving back to the North West of England. She was married in 1832 to William
Gaskell, a Unitarian parson from Manchester. Much of her time was now taken up
with supporting her husband in his work and raising a family. She turned to
writing perhaps as a therapy and certainly because she needed an alternative
outlet for her thoughts and energies.
Her first published novel, Mary Barton
(1848), attracted literary attention, including the praise of Charles Dickens
who asked her to contribute to his Household words periodical. Several
novels and short stories followed. A meeting with Charlotte Bronte in August
1850 led to a close friendship over the next five years before Charlotte's
death. Elizabeth then completed a biography of her friend which was published
in 1857. There was then a gap in her output until the appearance of Sylvia's
lovers in 1863. Three years later Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly at a
cottage she had bought in Alton, Hampshire, just before putting the finishing
touches to perhaps her most accomplished work, Wives and daughters.
Elizabeth Gaskell developed a style in her work
that possessed both insight and sympathy. An awareness of social concerns led
her to treat these with a frankness and boldness that some found uncomfortable
but difficult to ignore. Her range of subject matter is impressive, from
evocations of nature through to graphic representation of starving factory
hands, always with a gentle humour and steady narrative pace. The everyday
existence of small, close-knit community life was conveyed in a very readable
form with understanding.
Elizabeth
Gaskell (1810- 1865) – Windows Internet Explorer
20 Octubre
de 2008, 19:36
Page
created 9 February 2001 and last updated 7 April 2005
URL:
http://www3.shropshire-cc.gov.uk/gaskelle.htm
Academic year
2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Natalia Quintana Morán
naquinmo@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press
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