Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-65), novelist and short-story writer, was originally from Chelsea, London. She was raised and remained a Unitarian her entire life. After the death of her mother when she was a toddler, she was raised by a relation in Knutsford. In the 1840s and 1850s, influenced by James Martineau and the Christian socialists, she seemed drawn to a more emotional form of worship, and often attended Anglican services. Her only antipathy, she declared, was ‘to the Calvinistic or Low Church creed’ (Letters, 648). She married William Gaskell (1805-84) in 1832 in Manchester, where she was living at the time. He was the assistant minister at Cross Street Chapel (Unitarian). In 1846 he was appointed professor of history, literature, and logic at Manchester New College. At this time she met James Martineau, also at the college. In contrast to dry, traditional Unitarianism, Martineau energetically promoted a more emotional faith, insisting that ‘the unconscious affections’ underlay belief more than rational judgment, an emphasis that resembles the current of feeling in Gaskell's fiction. Elizabeth first published some short stories in 1847 and Mary Barton in 1848. Gaskell was never a wholehearted radical or feminist; while she treated controversial subjects, she elevates sympathy and communication above radical change. She met Geraldine Jewsbury, poet and novelist, from Manchester at this time, and soon Charlotte Bronte and learned of George Eliot. She wrote a biography of Bronte (1857), and other novels include Cranford (1853), North and South (1855), Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), and Wives and Daughters (1866). In 1854 William Gaskell became senior minister at Cross Street. Feminist criticism of the 1990s explored her subtle extension of female, maternal values from the domestic to the public sphere, her dramatization of the tension between old and new systems of values, and the relation between her experience as a woman writing for male editors, and that of the industrial workers she described. In the process, the powerfully subversive elements of Gaskell's shorter fiction have received belated recognition.