Born [Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson], in Chelsea, 29 Sept. 1810. Mother died Oct. 1810. Lived with her aunt in youth. At school at Stratford-on-Avon, 1825–27. Married to Rev. William Gaskell, 30 Aug. 1832. Lived in Manchester. Intimacy with William and Mary Howitt, and Dickens. Contrib. to “Household Words” from first no., March 1850. Friendship with Charlotte Brontë begun, 1850. Active literary life. Died suddenly, at Holybourne, Hampshire, 12 Nov. 1865. Buried at Knutsford. Works: “Clopton Hall,” in Howitt’s “Visits to Remarkable Places,” 1840; “Mary Barton” (anon.), 1848; “The Moorland Cottage” (anon.), 1850; “Ruth” (anon.), 1853; “Cranford” (anon.), 1853; “North and South” (anon.), 1855; “Lizzie Leigh” (anon.), 1855; “Life of Charlotte Brontë,” 1857 (2nd and 3rd edns. same year); “Round the Sofa,” 1859; “My Lady Ludlow,” 1859; “Right at Last” (anon.), 1860; “Lois the Witch,” 1861; “A Dark Night’s Work,” 1863; “Sylvia’s Lovers,” 1863 (2nd and 3rd edns. same year); “The Grey Woman,” 1865; “Hand and Heart,” 1865; “Cousin Phyllis,” 1865. Posthumous: “Wives and Daughters,” 1866. She edited: “Mabel Vaughan,” 1857; C. A. Vecchi’s “Garibaldi at Caprera,” 1862. Collected Works: in 7 vols., 1873.

Personal

  She is remarkably pleasing, unaffected, and easy in her manners, with a melodious voice in speaking.

  Mrs. Gaskell seems lovely at home, where besides being a writer she proves herself to be a first-class housekeeper, and performs all the duties of a minister’s wife.

  Report says that she was most beautiful to behold [1829]. There are, however, I believe no portraits of her at that time of life. The friends who knew her intimately in later years describe her face as possessing extreme interest rather than rare beauty. In a photograph taken shortly before her death, which one of her old pupils had the goodness to show me, she is seated at a table with a lace shawl thrown lightly over the figure. Rare refinement and delicacy of feature are the points which strike one at the first glance. One sees at once that she was a cultivated and high-souled woman. Her mouth is most delicately curved, and the eyes are of an exquisite shape. The same lady favoured me with the following detailed verbal description of Mrs. Gaskell from memory: “Her face was most interesting, with very delicately-cut features, and a specially fine brow. Her hair was dark, and her hazel eyes had an unusual brightness and animation when their owner was engaged in conversation. Her mouth was firm but kind, and almost always playing into a smile. She was of the medium height, graceful and dignified in her bearing.” This description, given by one who frequently saw her at the head of her own table, and also while she was engaged in teaching at the Sunday School, may, I think, be accepted, and justifies the idea entertained of her early beauty.

  Mrs. Gaskell was a very beautiful young woman. I heard her described only the other day by a friend who remembered her in her youth. She had a well-shaped head, regular, finely-cut features; her mien was bright and dignified, almost joyous, so my informant said, and among her many other gifts was that of delightful companionship. She was very young when she was married to the Reverend William Gaskell, minister of the Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester. She was married from her aunt’s house at Cranford at the Parish Church, and not in the beautiful old Unitarian Chapel, with its ivy-clad walls and its latticed windows, dating from Oliver Cromwell’s time. In those days marriages were only solemnised in the Parish Church.

Mary Barton, 1848

  Although pre-eminently a moralist in the sense of being a writer whose works touch the heart rather than the imagination or the philosophical intellect, Mrs. Gaskell is not to be numbered among the preachers. No one, however impatient of reproof and correction, need be frightened away from her novels by the fear of having to listen to didactic homilies. She prefixed a little sermon, pithy and well-timed, by way of preface to “Mary Barton,” extracting from it a lesson for the day; but the lesson is not formulated and expounded in the novel, which is, what it professes to be, a tale—a representation of life. It is shaped and coloured by the author’s good-natured wisdom but it is not stiffened and distorted as a work of art by any hard specific moral purpose. Mrs. Gaskell was, indeed, a born story-teller, charged through and through with the story-teller’s peculiar element, a something which may be called suppressed gipsiness, a restless instinct which impelled her to be constantly making trial in imagination of various modes of life.

  Of all Mrs. Gaskell’s books her earliest has enjoyed the most widespread reputation. It has been translated into French and German and many other languages, including Finnish; while at home the author became an established favourite. Some of the chief employers of labour in the Manchester district, however, complained that they were unjustly treated, and that she spoke rashly of some “burning questions of social economy.” She was accused in the Manchester “Guardian” (28 Feb. and 7 Mar. 1849) of “maligning” the manufacturers. Much of the same position was taken in W. R. Greg’s “Essay on Mary Barton” (1849), which he thought worth reprinting many years afterward (1876), in his volume entitled “Mistaken Aims and Attainable Ideals of the Artisan Class.” Without discussing the point here, it may be observed, as Prof. Minto has done, that John Barton must not be taken too hastily as a type of his whole class; that the book refers to the period of distress (1842) which suggested Disraeli’s “Sybil;” and that it has unquestionably contributed to the growth of sentiments which have helped to make the manufacturing world and Manchester very different from what they were forty years ago. The sincerity of its pathos and insight into the very hearts of the poor are of enduring value. Its humour is marked by the rather patriarchal flavour characteristic of Lancashire humour in general; nothing is more striking in Mrs. Gaskell’s literary life than the ease and rapidity with which, in this respect, her genius contrived to emancipate itself.

  Is one of the most powerful and moving stories in the whole literature of English fiction.

  This powerful and fascinating story at once set Mrs. Gaskell in the first rank of English novelists. People differed as to the views set forth in the book, but all were agreed as to its literary force and its great merits. Like “Alton Locke,” it has done much to break down class barriers and make the rich try to understand the poor; and when we see the great advance in this direction that has been made since the date of its publication, we are able partly to realise how startling the first appearance of such a book must have been…. “Mary Barton,” which for nearly half a century has been influencing people all over the world, owes its vitality very largely to the fact that Mrs. Gaskell knew the working people of Manchester, not as a professional doler out of tracts or charitable relief, not in any detestable, patronizing way, but knew them as friends.

  In 1847 she had finished that noble book, “Mary Barton,” that book with a “sob in it,” as the French critic says. Ah! quelle musique douloureuse dans un sanglot. But there is something far beyond a sob in “Mary Barton.” The writer is writing of what she has lived, not only of what she has read or even looked at as she passed her way.

Ruth, 1853

  Of course you have read “Ruth” by this time. Its style was a great refreshment to me, for its finish and fulness. How women have the courage to write, and publishers the spirit to buy, at a high price, the false and feeble representations of life and character that most feminine novels give, is a constant marvel to me. “Ruth,” with all its merits, will not be an enduring or classical fiction—will it? Mrs. Gaskell seems to me to be constantly misled by a love of sharp contrasts—of “dramatic” effects. She is not contented with the subdued coloring, the half-tints, of real life. Hence she agitates one for the moment, but she does not secure one’s lasting sympathy; her scenes and characters do not become typical. But how pretty and graphic are the touches of description! That little attic in the minister’s house, for example, which, with its pure white dimity bed-curtains, its bright-green walls, and the rich brown of its stained floor, remind one of a snowdrop springing out of the soil. Then the rich humor of Sally, and the sly satire in the description of Mr. Bradshaw. Mrs. Gaskell has, certainly, a charming mind, and one cannot help loving her as one reads her books.

  I am told, to my great astonishment, that you have heard painful speeches on account of “Ruth;” what was told me raised all my indignation and disgust. Now I have read only a little (though, of course, I know the story) of the book; for the same reason that I cannot read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or “Othello,” or “The Bride of Lammermoor.” It is too painfully good, as I found before I had read half a volume. But this I can tell you, that among all my large acquaintance I never heard, or have heard, but one unanimous opinion of the beauty and righteousness of the book, and that, above all, from real ladies, and really good women. If you could have heard the things which I heard spoken of it this evening by a thorough High Church fine lady of the world, and by her daughter, too, as pure and pious a soul as one need see, you would have no more doubt than I have, that whatsoever the “snobs” and the bigots may think, English people in general, have but one opinion of “Ruth,” and that is, one of utter satisfaction.

  Tell me if you have read Mrs. Gaskell’s “Ruth.” That’s a novel which I much admire. It is strong and healthy at once, teaching a moral frightfully wanted in English society…. By the way, “Ruth” is a great advance on “Mary Barton,” don’t you think so?

  We have grown serious in considering the scope and influence of this book, because it is so very sad. Like an autumn day, full of a low wailing wind, and a nameless sorrow, the tale sweeps on with its wan sunlights and long mournful shadows to the end…. The book is mellow, mature and sober. Its landscape painting is equally beautiful and characteristic. Those who know the woods, and waters, and country life, and small town life, and the lonely seashore life, will recognize in the descriptions of this book the heart and hand of one who has also felt them as they are.

  “Ruth,” her second great work in order of publication, is, as regards style and power, inferior to “Mary Barton,” perhaps to all her sustained effort. But it stands out from the rest, as the handling by a woman of a side of life which is unfortunately too often either ignored in real life and in fiction, or treated in a light, flippant manner.

Cranford, 1853

  No short tale could be more delightful; the early chapters describe the quiet, aristocratic country life of the female population of the little town, and are full of the richest humor. All is so telling and yet so good-natured, for Mrs. Gaskell is telling us about the worthy people among whom she passed the happy days of her girlhood.

  In “Cranford” (1853) Mrs. Gaskell passed into a more serene atmosphere, in which, describing under this name the Knutsford of her early acquaintance, she lovingly sets forth the genteel poverty, the innocent self-respecting pride, the quaint humours, and the gentle charities of a society of elderly spinsters and widows without children. Nothing could be done more simply, exquisitely, or with a higher air of truth. To have read “Cranford” is to have personally known the sleepy old place, to have come forever under the power of its charm, to have taken part in its innumerable tea-drinkings and games of Preference, to have trembled at the uncanny feats of Signor Brunoni, and to have fallen irrevocably in love with dear, old, pathetic Miss Matty.

  I am sure Cranford existed in the quarter in Paris where my own early youth was passed. I can remember it in Kensington also, though we did not quite go the length of putting our cows into gray flannel dressing-gowns, as Miss Betsy Barker did. Perhaps Cranford did not even stop at Kensington, but may have reached farther afield, taking Chiswick on its way. Miss Deborah, as she preferred to be called, is certainly first cousin to Miss Pinkerton; can either of these ladies have been connected with the unrivalled Miss Seward herself? I do not quite know upon what terms Miss Seward and Dr. Johnson happened to be, but I could imagine the great lexicographer driving them all before him and Miss Pinkerton’s turban, or Miss Jenkyns in her little helmet-like bonnet. Miss Deborah and Miss Pinkerton belong to an altogether bygone type, but all the rest of the ladies in Cranford are as modern and as much alive as if they had been born in the 60’s.

  One province she discovered and made her own—feminine society in out-of-the-way towns and villages before the encroachment of railroads and penny postage. Of this life Cranford is the classic. Here is described the old-style etiquette, the genteel poverty, the formal calls, and evening parties, of a village wholly in the possession of the Amazons—widows and spinsters—where no men are tolerated, except the country doctor, who is allowed to stay there occasionally over-night when on his long circuit. Old maids spent their time in tea-drinking and stale gossip, and in chasing sunbeams from their carpets. Before going to bed they peep beneath the white dimity valance or roll a ball under it, to be sure no Iachimo with “great fierce face” lies concealed there. So ends the day of trivialities and Gothic fears.

  It was discovered long ago that the place “Cranford,” described in Mrs. Gaskell’s famous story, was Knutsford—in England, of course. To the old house on the heath in Knutsford, the baby, Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson, came when only a few weeks old to be brought up by her aunt; and there she lived till she grew to womanhood. In the parish church she was married, and in the quiet graveyard on the sloping bankside by Brook Street her ashes rest. Thus it is that Knutsford is identified with the personality of Mrs. Gaskell and, besides, she has put it into many of her books. It is “Cranford” most of all.

North and South, 1855

  It [“North and South”] is one of Mrs. Gaskell’s ablest and most interesting books. It exhibits, at least till near the close, a notable advance in constructive powers; the characters are drawn with unprecedented firmness, and in some cases tinged with true humour, and though there is no loss of sympathy for the artisan the judgment of social problems shows greater impartiality and riper reflections. Her experience was widened and her interest in politics had grown deeper. She had made acquaintance with many able philanthropists, and in the company of Susanna Winkworth had moved about a good deal among the working classes, listened to discussions of workmen’s clubs, and made herself the confidante of many a poor girl. Dickens was warm in his congratulations to Mrs. Gaskell “on the vigorous and powerful accomplishment of an anxious labour.” But for some defects of construction, due perhaps in part to the piecemeal method of weekly publication which the authoress heartily disliked, “North and South” might safely be described as her most effective narrative fiction.

Life of Charlotte Brontë, 1857

  Let me renew our long-interrupted acquaintance by complimenting you on poor Miss Brontë’s “Life.” You have had a delicate and a great work to do, and you have done it admirably. Be sure that the book will do good. It will shame literary people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical home-life is consistent with high imaginative genius; and it will shame, too, the prudery of a not over cleanly, though carefully white-washed age, into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite compatible with the knowledge of evil. I confess that the book has made me ashamed of myself.

  Patrick Branwell Brontë was no domestic demon—he was just a man moving in a mist, who lost his way. More sinned against, mayhap, than sinning, at least he proved the reality of his sorrows. They killed him, and it needed not that his memory should have been tarnished, much, as I think, to the detriment of the “Biography” of his sister. I am desirous to be anything rather than a hostile critic of the memoir. Mrs. Gaskell was an intimate friend of my family, and her husband at one time my father’s colleague in the ministry. I admire “Mary Barton” and her other Novels greatly. Towards her memory I have the kindest feeling; but Fiat justitia! and I must say what I can in favour of my old friend.

  The substantial accuracy of the picture drawn by Mrs. Gaskell of her heroine’s life and character, and of the influences exercised upon them by her personal and local surroundings, has not been successfully impugned. As to her literary skill and power and absolute uprightness of intention as a biographer there cannot be two opinions. She expressly disclaimed having made any attempt at psychological analysis; but she was exceptionally successful in her endeavor to bring before her readers the picture of a very peculiar character and altogether original mind.

  Mrs. Gaskell set an example in this book which has added a new terror to death and a new danger to those whose lives fall under that fierce light which beats not only upon thrones, but on many less exalted regions in these curious and all-inquiring days.

  In the whole of English biographical literature there is no book that can compare in wide-spread interest with the “Life of Charlotte Brontë” by Mrs. Gaskell. It has held a position of singular popularity for forty years; and while biography after biography has come and gone, it still commands a place side by side with Boswell’s “Johnson,” and Lockhart’s “Scott.” As far as mere readers are concerned, it may indeed claim its hundreds as against the tens of intrinsically more important rivals. There are obvious reasons for this success. Mrs. Gaskell was herself a popular novelist, who commanded a very wide audience, and “Cranford,” at least, has taken a place among the classics of our literature. She brought to bear upon the biography of Charlotte Brontë all those literary gifts which had made the charm of her seven volumes of romance. And these gifts were employed upon a romance of real life, not less fascinating than anything which imagination could have furnished…. It is quite certain that Charlotte Brontë would not stand on so splendid a pedestal to-day but for the single-minded devotion of her accomplished biographer.

  Mrs. Gaskell’s book was avowedly incomplete in so far as she was unable to give the names of many persons and places, indeed, in some cases she cannot have known them, as Miss Nussey eliminated many of them from the letters she lent Mrs. Gaskell. But when these are filled in, and, apart from what Mary Taylor called the declamation, which is practically confined to the Branwell-Robinson episode, it is difficult to conceive a biography of Charlotte Brontë, which, even with all the new facts before the writer, would be an improvement on Mrs. Gaskell’s. A few minor details might be added, but her main facts and conclusions have in no instance been proved wrong, and they are presented in such a way as to give a true and vivid picture of the life and character of the subject of her memoir which is hardly surpassed by any biography in the English language.

Wives and Daughters, 1865

  The story of Molly Gibson’s life is so uneventful, and at the same time her character is so fully and delicately described, that only the most careful analysis can do it justice. There is the same minute realism in the picture of daily life as we find in Jane Austen; but there is, we think, a finer perception and deeper insight. Not only is every shade of conduct and character noted and described, but subtle and tender feelings are discerned, and the atmosphere is no longer that of genteel comedy.

  Worthy to be placed beside “John Halifax, Gentleman,” that modern epic of the true Christian life, is Mrs. Gaskell’s “Wives and Daughters.” Few if any novels can vie with this in naturalness and in the evolution of really entrancing interest out of the most ordinary and matter-of-course incidents of English life. Molly Gibson, the loved and loving daughter of the country doctor, who is drawn into a second marriage by the ex-governess and curate’s widow, is one of the most finished studies of girlhood in English fiction. The step-mother, Mrs. Gibson, is drawn to the life, and then the old squire in his relations to his very diverse sons is equally real. The whole reads like what it is—a most faithful transcript from nature itself. Amid so much that is most amusing here, we have ever and anon a deep full note of humanity in its more passionate phases; and there are passages such as those where Squire Hamley grieves for his wife, and especially where he utters his exceedingly bitter cry over the death of his first-born, which draw tears from the eyes of the old as well as the young, and such tears as show through their mist some gleams of immortality and Heaven. What is most remarkable, too, about this novel is that it moves the reader without employing the machinery of anything in the least abnormal, unnatural, or even unlikely.

General

  The authoress was a prose Crabbe—earnest, faithful, and often spirited in her delineations of humble life. By confining herself chiefly to the manufacturing population, she threw light on conditions of life, habits, and feelings comparatively new and original in our fictitious literature.

  No one would dream of ranking Mrs. Gaskell as a novelist beside Dickens or Thackeray, but she deserves a very high place among those who are comparatively unambitious in their efforts, and who, having a just measure of their own powers, succeed perfectly in what they undertake. She never attempted high flights, but pursued her way steadily and surely at a moderate elevation. Her style has not the magnificent reach of her friend, Charlotte Brontë; it is homely, as suited her subjects. It was natural that art such as hers, working earnestly within a definite field, without straining to get beyond it, and never wasting its strength against the precipices, should become more perfect as she went on.

  When, after the strain to which Mrs. Gaskell had been subjected by the publication of her “Life of Charlotte Brontë,” a master-piece, in spite of all early cavils and later supplements, she returned to fiction, she proved to have finally formed the style which is inalienably her own. Its exquisite delicacy of texture and tender grace, subduing but not concealing an irony which is the secret of the finest of English humorous prose, characterise each of her last three fictions…. The biography of Mrs. Gaskell we know, is likely to remain unwritten; and though literary criticism must chafe against conditions which impair its force, the restriction may in this instance not prove wholly disadvantageous. Something may be learnt by guessing, instead of being taught in detail, how a self-control which matured a literary style as strong as it is tender, and as subtle as it is sweet, reflected the wondrously diversified experiences of a pure and disciplined woman’s life.

  She has written one or two short books which are technically faultless, and might be taken as types of the novel form. Strange to say, the recognition of her delicate and many-sided genius has never been quite universal, and has endured periods of obscuration. Her work has not the personal interest of Thackeray’s, nor the intense unity and compression of Charlotte Brontë’s. It may even be said that Mrs. Gaskell suffers from having done well too many things. She wrote, perhaps, a purer and a more exquisite English than either of her rivals, but she exercised it in too many fields.

  Few writers, we think, have exercised a more thoroughly wholesome influence over their readers than Mrs. Gaskell.

  Mrs. Gaskell saw everything in the light of a sympathetic humour. It is this quality that has served hitherto as salt to her books and has preserved their flavour while that of a great deal of more ambitious literature has been lost. If her humour is not equal to the best specimens of that of George Eliot, it is more diffused; if less powerful, it is gentler and quite as subtle. In style she is easy and flowing; and her later books show more freedom than her first attempt. At the same time, her writing rarely rises to eloquence. She had more talent than genius. She has created many good, but no great characters; and she stands midway between Thackeray and Dickens, who are emphatically men of genius, and writers like Trollope who, with abundant talent and exhaustless industry, have no genius whatever.

  Hardly aspiring to the title of novelist, she frequently reminded her public that she was writing only tales. These tales were told in the first person, and for the moral edification of her own sex. In form and aim they were accordingly of the Edgeworth type. Indeed Mrs. Gaskell may be said, in a general way, to have performed in them the same noble service to her contemporaries that Maria Edgeworth did to hers. She entered into the thoughts and wayward moods of children with true insight; she gave us the first English nurses and housekeepers of hard common sense and racy wit, the Nancys and the Sallys.

  Mrs. Gaskell’s short prose compositions would, in a writer of less eminence, themselves constitute a title to distinction; and their having failed to command the recognition they deserve is undoubtedly due to their inequality, so flawless a gem as “Cousin Phillis” being found with the collection that includes the commonplace production called “Hand and Heart.” But some of the tales, notably “Cousin Phillis” and “The Crooked Branch,” the one for grace and perfection of workmanship, the other for powerful and dramatic presentation, have never been surpassed by any of the longer novels written by Mrs. Gaskell…. Judged by the present arbitrary rules which prevail amongst modern critics, as to the nature and essentials of the short story, Mrs. Gaskell’s tales would be weighed and found wanting; but they submit satisfactorily to tests that are likely to be more universal and permanent, and display their authoress as a perfect mistress in this branch of fiction, whose art adequately satisfies and responds to the reader’s instincts and demands. Mrs. Gaskell has a story to tell, some phenomena of human nature or life to present, and she sets them forth with perfect unity and completeness…. The varied range of powers exhibited by Mrs. Gaskell, her capacity for delineating the most diverse phenomena of human life and nature, ranging from an exquisite idyll flowing in the softest measures, to a concentrated tragedy of terrible and profound emotion, is completed by the delightful little piece called “Mr. Harrison’s Confessions.” The mere incidents narrating the arrival of a young and lively and nice-looking doctor in a town full of ladies, mostly old and gossiping are nothing; but the play of light and genial humour which is shed around them, the good-humoured satire free of every touch of acerbity or judgment, with which their foibles and habits are painted, and the capital portraiture of certain old-fashioned and fast-dying types are only to be matched in the pages of Addison at his brightest and best.