page_title: Elizabeth Gaskell
section_title: Married life and writing career
hierarchical_section_title: Elizabeth Gaskell / Married life and writing career
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Elizabeth Gaskell by George Richmond (1851) Scanned by Phrood. Quelle: selbst gescannt 02:45, 6. Jul 2005 Phrood 790 x 1076 (82225 Byte) (Elizabeth Gaskell, gemeinfrei)
context_page_description: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her work is of interest to social historians as well as readers of literature. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Brontë. In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë’s life; the rest she left out, deciding that certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden. Among Gaskell's best known novels are Cranford, North and South, and Wives and Daughters, each having been adapted for television by the BBC.
context_section_description: On 30 August 1832 Elizabeth married a Unitarian minister, William Gaskell, in Knutsford. They spent their honeymoon in North Wales, staying with her uncle, Samuel Holland, near Porthmadog. The Gaskells then settled in Manchester, where William was the minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel.  Manchester's industrial surroundings influenced Elizabeth's writing in the industrial genre. Their first child, a daughter, was stillborn in 1833. Their other children were Marianne (1834), Margaret Emily, known as Meta (1837), Florence Elizabeth (1842), and Julia Bradford (1846). Marianne and Meta boarded at the private school conducted by Rachel Martineau, sister of Harriet, a close friend of Elizabeth.  Florence married Charles Crompton, a barrister and Liberal politician, in 1863.
  In March 1835 Gaskell began a diary documenting the development of her daughter Marianne: she explored parenthood, the values she placed on her role as a mother; her faith, and, later, relations between Marianne and her sister, Meta.  In 1836 she co-authored with her husband a cycle of poems, Sketches among the Poor, which was published in Blackwood's Magazine in January 1837. In 1840 William Howitt published Visits to Remarkable Places containing a contribution entitled Clopton Hall by "A Lady", the first work was written and published solely by her.  In April 1840 Howitt published The Rural Life of England, which included a second work titled Notes on Cheshire Customs.
  In July 1841 the Gaskells traveled to Belgium and Germany.  German literature came to have a strong influence on her short stories, the first of which she published in 1847 as Libbie Marsh's Three Eras, in Howitt's Journal, under the pseudonym "Cotton Mather Mills".  But other influences including Adam Smith's Social Politics enabled a much wider understanding of the cultural milieu in which her works were set.  Her second story printed under the pseudonym was The Sexton's Hero. And she made her last use of it in 1848, with the publication of her story Christmas Storms and Sunshine.
  A son, William, (1844–45), died in infancy, and this tragedy was the catalyst for Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton.She began writing her first novel to escape the grief of losing her only son. It was ready for publication in October 1848, shortly before they made the move south.  It was an enormous success, selling thousands of copies.  Ritchie called it a "great and remarkable sensation."  It was praised by Thomas Carlyle and Maria Edgeworth.  She brought the teeming slums of manufacturing in Manchester alive to readers as yet unacquainted with crowded narrow alleyways.  Her obvious depth of feeling was evident, while her turn of phrase and description was described as the greatest since Jane Austen.
  In 1850 the Gaskells moved to a villa at 84 Plymouth Grove. She took her cow with her. For exercise, she would happily walk three miles to help another person in distress.  In Manchester, Elizabeth wrote her remaining literary works, while her husband held welfare committees and tutored the poor in his study. The Gaskells' social circle included writers, journalists, religious dissenters, and social reformers such as William and Mary Howitt and Harriet Martineau. Poets, patrons of literature and writers such as  Lord Houghton,  Charles Dickens and John Ruskin visited Plymouth Grove, as did the American writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Eliot Norton, while the conductor Charles Hallé, who lived close by, taught piano to one of their daughters. Elizabeth's friend Charlotte Brontë stayed there three times, and on one occasion hid behind the drawing room curtains as she was too shy to meet the Gaskells' other visitors.
  In early 1850 Gaskell wrote to Charles Dickens asking for advice about assisting a girl named Pasley whom she had visited in prison. Pasley provided her with a model for the title character of Ruth in 1853. Lizzie Leigh was published in March and April 1850, in the first numbers of Dickens's journal Household Words, in which many of her works were to be published, including Cranford and 
caption: Elizabeth Gaskell: 1851 portrait by George Richmond
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