Elizabeth Gaskell never completed her final novel, Wives and Daughters, due to her early death in 1865. It appeared serially in The Cornhill Magazine between August 1864 and January 1866. Her last work is considered her best, representing the pinnacle… Read More ›
Although written in 1846, Charlotte Brontë’s first novel, The Professor, would not be published until after her 1855 death. Clearly autobiographical, it served as a model for her later, more fully developed version of her experiences in Brussels as a… Read More ›
Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel of social injustice, Mary Barton, was banned in 1907 by the London County Council, which deemed the novel unfit for children aged 14 and under. That action supports the power of Gaskell’s prose to influence readers in… Read More ›
One of Elizabeth Gaskell’s best-known novels, Cranford, focuses on an English community of mature women, to which men seldom gain admittance. It first appeared in series form (1851–53) in Charles Dickens’s periodical Household Words and was meant only as a… Read More ›
Feminist literary criticism has its origins in the intellectual and political feminist movement. It advocates a critique of maledominated language and performs “resistant” readings of literary texts or histories. Based on the premise that social systems are patriarchal—organized to privilege… Read More ›
Round the Sofa, a two-volume collection of stories, short novels, and essays by Elizabeth Gaskell, was made up of earlier works published previously in magazines, notably Charles Dickens’s Household Words and, in America, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. The disparate… Read More ›
First published in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words from June 19 until September 25, 1858 and reprinted in Round the Sofa in 1859, “My Lady Ludlow” is presented as one of a “chain” of stories connected by a prologue. As… Read More ›
This story was first published in the extra Christmas number of Household Words (edited by Charles Dickens) and was republished in Elizabeth Gaskell’s collection Right at Last and Other Tales (1860). It tells the story of Alice Openshaw, who moves… Read More ›
Elizabeth Gaskell’s story “Lois the Witch” was first published in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round in October 1859. Set during the Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials of 1692, the story offers a fi ctionalized chronicle of Lois Barclay, a… Read More ›
Published in the collection Round the Sofa and Other Tales (1859), “The Half Brothers” is, as its title suggests, about two brothers, and it recalls those Old Testament brothers divided by enmity: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and… Read More ›
An episodic novel of linked stories set in Cranford, a fictitious country town in northern England. First serialized in Household Words, a weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens, between December 1851 and May 1853, Cranford appeared in volume form in… Read More ›
Cousin Phyllis is one of Elizabeth Gaskell’s later works and one in which she returns to the rural Cheshire of her youth. Cousin Phyllis was first published by George Smith in his Cornhill Magazine in four monthly parts from November… Read More ›
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