| Mrs Gaskell |
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Introduction
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(1810-1865).—
Novelist, daughter of William Stevenson, a Unitarian
minister, and for some time Keeper of the Treasury Records. She
married William G., a Unitarian minister, at Manchester, and in 1848
published anonymously her first book, Mary Barton, in which the
life and feelings of the manufacturing working classes are depicted
with much power and sympathy. Other novels followed, Lizzie
Leigh (1855), Mr. Harrison’s Confessions (1865),
Ruth (1853), Cranford (1851-3), North and South
(1855), Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), etc. Her last work was
Wives and Daughters (1865), which appeared in the Cornhill
Magazine, and was left unfinished. Mrs. G. had some of the
characteristics of Miss Austen, and if her style and delineation of
character are less minutely perfect, they are, on the other hand,
imbued with a deeper vein of feeling. She was the friend of Charlotte
Bronté (q.v.), to whom her sympathy brought much comfort,
and whose Life she wrote. Of Cranford Lord Houghton
wrote, “It is the finest piece of humoristic description that has
been added to British literature since Charles Lamb.”
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