Reason always means what someone else has got to say.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell raised quite a stir in 1848 when she anonymously published her first novel. A Tale of Manchester Life was the first realistic portrayal of English factory workers caught up in the Industrial Revolution and was also notable for its use of the regional dialect. Readers were shocked by the grim conditions and social pressures described in the novel, but many influential critics repudiated the work for its obvious sympathy for the workers and its one-sided depiction of the labor system. Her anonymity soon broken, Elizabeth found herself the target of both adulation and scorn, a far cry from her quiet country upbringing and the life she knew from her 15 years of marriage to a Unitarian clergyman in Manchester. Although she had penned a few essays and poems from time to time, Elizabeth seriously turned to writing at the urging of her husband in an attempt to assuage the sorrow of a stillborn baby and the death of another child when he was just 9 months old.