ELIZABETH GASKELL
BIOGRAPHY
Elizabeth Gaskell was a Victorian novelist, also noted for her biography
of her friend Charlotte Brontë.
She was born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson in London on September 29, 1810,
the daughter of a Unitarian minister. Gaskell was one of eight children, two of
whom survived. (Her surviving brother John later went missing on a trip to
India.) After her mother's early death, she was raised in Cheshire, England,
where she lived with an aunt in Knutsford. Gaskell's happy memories of
Knutsford would later have a key role in inspiring Cranford.
Gaskell was sent to boarding school, later going to Chelsea to care for
her ailing father. In 1832, she married William Gaskell, also a Unitarian
minister, and they settled in the industrial city of Manchester, her home for
the rest of her life. Motherhood and the obligations of being a minister's wife
kept her busy. However, the death of her only son intensified both her sense of
identity with the poor and her desire to express their hardship, and Gaskell
began to write.
Her first novel, Mary Barton, told the story of a working-class
family in which the father, John Barton, lapses into bitter class hatred and
carries out a retaliatory murder at the behest of his trade union. Published
anonymously, its timely appearance in the revolutionary year of 1848 brought
the novel immediate success, winning the praise of Charles Dickens and Thomas
Carlyle.
Dickens invited her to contribute to his magazine, Household Words,
where her next major work, Cranford, was serialized beginning in 1851.
This, her most popular work, described her girlhood village of Knutsford and
the efforts of its shabby-genteel inhabitants to keep up appearances. North
and South was published in 1854.
Gaskell's work brought her many fans, including Charlotte Brontë. When
Brontë died in 1855, her father, Patrick Brontë, asked Gaskell to write her
biography. The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) was written with
admiration and covered a huge quantity of firsthand material with great
narrative skill.
Among her
later works, Sylvia's Lovers (1863), dealing with the impact of the
Napoleonic Wars upon simple people, is notable. Her last and longest work, Wives and Daughters (1864-66), concerned the
interlocking fortunes of two or three country families and is considered by
many her finest work. Gaskell died before it was finished.
Funding for Masterpiece is provided by the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting and public television viewers.
Masterpiece
| Cranford | PBS – Windows Internet Explorer
20 Octubre de 2008, 20:32
URL: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/cranford/gaskell.html
Academic
year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Natalia Quintana Morán
naquinmo@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press
Ţ MORE BIOGRAPHIES: [1]
[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
[13]
[14]