Works by
Elizabeth Gaskell
(Aka Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell)
(Writer)
[September 29, 1810 – November 12, 1865]

Collections

• The Moorland Cottage (1850, UK, US)
  The Moorland Cottage (1850) by Elizabeth Gaskell follows the life story of a very different sister and brother, Maggie and Edward Browne, children of the late curate of Combehurst, who live with their grieving widow mother in the moorland cottage of the novel title. For years Maggie, gentle, dutiful, and loving, does what she can on behalf of her brother, the overbearing and selfish Edward, and yet their mother continues to prefer her son to the very end. A complicated and touching story of familial bonds and the search for happiness by the talented contemporary of Charlotte Bronte.

• The Old Nurse's Story (1852, UK, US)

• Lizzie Leigh (1855, UK, US)
  1855 short story from the English novelist and short story writer, whose writings can be seen as critiques of Victorian era attitudes, particularly those toward women, with complex narratives and dynamic women characters.

• My Lady Ludlow (1859, UK, US)

• Round the Sofa (1859, UK, US)

• Lois the Witch (1861, UK, US)
  Recently orphaned, Lois is forced to leave the English parsonage that had been her home, and sail to America. A God-fearing and honest girl, she has little to fear in this new life. Yet as she joins her distant family, she finds jealousy and dissention are rife, and her cousins quick to point the finger at the 'impostor'. With the whole of Salem gripped by a fear of the supernatural, it seems her home is where she is in most danger. Lonely and afraid, the words of an old curse return to haunt her.

• A Dark Night's Work (1863, UK, US)

Fiction

• Mary Barton (1848, UK, US)
  Set in Manchester in the 1840s - a period of industrial unrest and extreme deprivation - Mary Barton depicts the effects of economic and physical hardship upon the city's working-class community. Paralleling the novel's treatment of the relationship between masters and men, the suffering of the poor, and the workmen's angry response, is the story of Mary herself: a factory-worker's daughter who attracts the attentions of the mill-owner's son, she becomes caught up in the violence of class conflict when a brutal murder forces her to confront her true feelings and allegiances.
  
  Mary Barton was praised by contemporary critics for its vivid realism, its convincing characters and its deep sympathy with the poor, and it still has the power to engage and move readers today. This edition reproduces the last edition of the novel supervised by Elizabeth Gaskell and includes her husband's two lectures on the Lancashire dialect.

• Cranford (1851, 1853, UK, US)
  Cranford is the best known and most charming of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels. It is a comic portrait of an early Victorian country village and its genteel inhabitants, mostly women, whose social attitudes remain firmly unchanging against the modernizing world, and whose domestic details dominate conversation. Gaskell describes the uneventful lives of Cranford's inhabitants in this witty and poignant classic which deserves to be read and re-read.  See also The Cranford Chronicles.

• Ruth (1853, UK, US)
  Ruth Hilton is an orphaned young seamstress who catches the eye of a gentleman, Henry Bellingham, who is captivated by her simplicity and beauty. When she loses her job and home, he offers her comfort and shelter, only to cruelly desert her soon after. Nearly dead with grief and shame, Ruth is offered the chance of a new life among people who give her love and respect, even though they are at first unaware of her secret - an illegitimate child. When Henry enters her life again, however, Ruth must make the impossible choice between social acceptance and personal pride. In writing Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell daringly confronted prevailing views about sin and illegitimacy with her compassionate and honest portrait of a fallen woman'.

• North and South (1855, UK, US)
  This novel is a study of the contrast between the values and habits of rural southern England and industrial northern England. The heroine, Margaret Hale, is the daughter of a parson whose religious doubts force him to resign his Hampshire living and to move with his family to a northern city.

• Sylvia's Lovers (1863, UK, US)
  Elizabeth Gaskell's only historical novel, Sylvia's Lovers, is set in 1790 in the seaside town of Monkshaven (Whitby) where press-gangs wreak havoc by seizing young men for service in the Napoleonic wars. One of their victims is whaling harpooner, Charley Kinraid, whose charm and vivacity have captured the heart of Sylvia Robson. But Sylvia's devoted cousin, Philip Hepburn, hopes to marry her himself and, in order to win her, deliberately withholds crucial information with devastating consequences. With its themes of suffering, unrequited love, and the clash between desire and duty, Sylvia's Lovers is one of the most powerfully moving of all Gaskell's novels, reputedly described by its author as 'the saddest story I ever wrote'.

• Cousin Phillis (1864, UK, US)
  1864 novel from the English novelist and short story writer, whose writings can be seen as critiques of Victorian era attitudes, particularly those toward women, with complex narratives and dynamic women characters.

• Wives and Daughters: An Everyday Story (1865, UK, US)
  Focusing on two families, the Gibsons and the Hamleys, this novel describes the habits, loyalties, prejudices, petty snobberies, rumors and adjustments of a whole countryside hierarchy.

• Cranford/ Cousin Phillis (1976, UK, US)
  Here are two of Elizabeth Gaskell's classic novels. Cranford depicts the lives and preoccupations of the inhabitants of a small village. Cousin Phillis depicts a fleeting love affair in a rural community at a time when old values are being supplanted by the new.

• Mr. Harrison's Confessions (2004, UK, US)

• The Cranford Chronicles (UK, US) (2007)
  Based on three Elizabeth Gaskell novels, The Cranford Chronicles follows the small absurdities and major tragedies in the lives of the people of Cranford, a small Cheshire market town, during one extraordinary year. In this witty and poignant story the railway is pushing its way relentlessly towards the town from Manchester, bringing fears of migrant workers and the breakdown of law and order. The arrival of handsome young Doctor Harrison causes yet further agitation not just because of his revolutionary methods but also because of his effect on the hearts of the ladies. Meanwhile Miss Matty Jenkyns nurses her own broken heart after she was forced to give up the man she loved when she was a young girl.

Short Stories

• Libbie Marsh's Three Eras (1847, UK, US)

• Half a Life-time Ago (1855, UK, US)
  Susan and Michael were to be married in April. He had already gone to take possession of his new farm, three or four miles away from Yew Nook--but that is neighbouring, according to the acceptation of the word in that thinly-populated district,--when William Dixon fell ill. He came home one evening, complaining of head-ache and pains in his limbs.

• An Accursed Race (1855, UK, US)

• The Poor Clare (1856, UK, US)
  Short story from the English novelist and short story writer, whose writings can be seen as critiques of Victorian era attitudes, particularly those toward women, with complex narratives and dynamic women characters.

• The Manchester Marriage (1858, UK, US)

• The Half-brothers (1859, UK, US)

• The Grey Woman (1861, UK, US)

• Four Short Stories (1983, UK, US

• Curious, If True (1995, UK, US)
  In these short stories, Mrs Gaskell unleashes her fascination with the macabre. Cross-dressing and sadistic husbands, witch trials, curses, supernatural doubles and fairy feasts at midnight bear witness to strange powers.

• Gothic Tales (2000, UK, US)

• Victorian Short Stories (2005, UK, US)

• Cranford and Selected Short Stories (2006, UK, US)
  The sheer variety and accomplishment of Elizabeth Gaskell's shorter fiction is amazing.This new volume contains six of her finest stories that have been selected specifically to demonstrate this, and to trace the development of her art. As diverse in setting as in subject matter, these tales move from the gentle comedy of life in a small English country town in "Dr Harrison's Confessions", to atmospheric horror in far north-west Wales with "The Doom of the Griffiths". The story of "Cousin Phillis", her masterly tale of love and loss, is a subtle, complex and perceptive analysis of changes in English national life during an industrial age, while the gripping "Lois the Witch" recreates the terrors of the Salem witchcraft trials in seventeenth-century New England, as "Gaskell" shrewdly shows the numerous roots of this furious outbreak of delusion. Whimsically modified fairy tales are set in a French chateau, while an engaging love story poetically evokes peasant life in wine-growing Germany.

• Right at Last, and Other Tales (2007, UK, US)

Non-fiction

• The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857, UK, US)
  Elizabeth Gaskell's Life appeared in 1857 to immediate popular acclaim among Victorian readers curious to discover more about the writer who had given Jane Eyre the subtitle, An Autobiography.
  
  In writing about Charlotte Brontë, whom she greatly admired, but whose novels she did not entirely like, Elizabeth Gaskell portrays the struggle of a woman artist for whom she had, until her late marriage, "foreseen the single life".
  
  The resulting work--the first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist--almost single-handedly created the Brontë myth. As Elisabeth Jay discusses in her introduction to this new edition, the Life weaves facts, dates, characters and anecdotes with considerable art, Gaskell's "Charlotte was an imaginative creation and, as such, took on a life of it's own". The present text follows the controversial first edition throughout, while all the variations which appeared in the third edition have been recorded in an appendix.

See also:

• Mrs. Gaskell's Observation and Invention: A Study of Her Non-Biographic Works (1970, UK, US) by John Geoffrey Sharps

• Themes of Elizabeth Gaskell (1980, UK, US) by Duthie

• Elizabeth Gaskell (1983, UK, US) by J.A.V. Chapple and John Geoffrey Sharps

• Elizabeth Gaskell and the Novel of Local Pride (1985, UK)

• Female Friendships and Communities: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell (1985, UK, US) by Pauline Nestor

•  

• Elizabeth Gaskell (1986, UK, US) by Coral Lansbury

• Elizabeth Gaskell (1986, UK, US) by Tessa Brodetsky

• Elizabeth Gaskell (1987, 2007, UK, US) by Patsy Stoneman
  This pioneering study, described as ‘a model of feminist criticism’ (The Year’s Work in English Studies) on first publication, revealed Gaskell as an important social analyst who deliberately challenged the Victorian disjunction between public and private ethical values, who maintained a steady resistance to aggressive authority, advocating female friendship, rational motherhood and the power of speech as forces for social change. 

• Elizabeth Gaskell (1979, 1991, UK, US) by Angus Easson
  Since the publication of her first novel, "Mary Barton" in 1848, Elizabeth Gaskell's writing has provoked extensive and wide-ranging criticism. This collection brings together the varied critical responses to her work between 1848 and 1910, and includes comments from the letters and diaries of such contemporaries as Carlyle, Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot and Prosper Merime, as well as more formal reviews and notices. The pieces show that, whether tackling the problematic relations between "masters and men", or entering contemporary debate on the "fallen woman", Gaskell's novels caught the mood of her age and captured the imagination of her critics.

• Elizabeth Gaskell (1993, UK, US) by Eva Figes and Jane Spencer

• Some Appointed Work to Do: Women and Vocation in the Fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell (1995, UK, US) by Robin B. Colby
  This text examines Elizabeth Gaskell's life and work against a backdrop of Victorian middle-class women's experience. The writer can be considered radical for her time, because she challenged widely-held assumptions about the nature of women and their proper sphere of activity.

• Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (1999, UK, US) by Jennifer Uglow
  Elizabeth Gaskell won fame and notoriety as the author of "Mary Barton Ruth". This biography looks at Elizabeth's life and work, looking at how Elizabeth observed, from her Manchester home, the brutal but transforming impact of industry and writing down the truth of what she observed.

• Elizabeth Gaskell's Use of Color in Her Industrial Novels and Short Stories (1999, UK, US) by Katherine Ann Wildt
  Gaskell, author of North and South and Mary Barton has recently been reappraised for her accurate reportage of social conflict in English society during the Industrial Revolution. The author of this book, however, focuses upon Gaskell's skill as an artist of details.