Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born in 1810 in London. Her mother, who came from a well-connected middle-class family, died when Elizabeth was a baby, and her father, a clergyman and writer called William Stevenson, remarried. Elizabeth spent much of her childhood in a town called Knutsford, where she was brought up by her aunt and lived very happily, surrounded by caring relatives. Elizabeth's family were Unitarians, a form of Christianity that was unusually tolerant for that period and that emphasised the importance of improving social conditions for the poor. It was very influential in forming Elizabeth's character and attitudes.
In 1832 Elizabeth married William Gaskell, a Unitarian clergyman, writer and lecturer. The couple settled in Manchester and had four children there.
Besides doing work among the sick and the poor, the Gaskells lived a very social life, and their friends included great writers and people who, like the Gaskells, were working among the poor.
Gaskell started writing short stories quite early in her writing career but it was the death of her little son that caused her to write her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), at the age of thirty-eight, as a way of taking her mind off her grief. The novel was a success and was admired by the important writer Charles Dickens, and between 1851 and 1853 Gaskell's second novel, Cranford, was published at irregular intervals in Dickens's magazine, Household Words.
Gaskell's next novel, Ruth, was published in 1853, and was followed by North and South. The Life of Charlotte Bronte came out two years later, in 1857. Gaskell's last novel,Wives and Daughters, was published in 1866, after her death in 1865.
Elizabeth Gaskell was a lively, amusing, very charming woman, with a huge enjoyment of life and people. She had many friends in London, Europe and the United States and was very involved in the political, religious and scientific issues of the time. She died of a heart attack on 12 November 1865.
Until quite recently, Elizabeth Gaskell was known as 'Mrs Gaskell', a name that reflected her reputation as a writer of gentle, uneventful, easy-to-read novels.This was largely due to the success of Cranford, her most popular book during her lifetime. Based on Knutsford, the town where Gaskell was brought up, Cranford is a delightful, gently amusing picture of small-town life. But Gaskell wrote fiction of great variety and Mary Barton, her first novel, could not have been more different. Due to the influence of Unitarianism, the author was very committed to improving conditions for the poor, and like North and South, the story takes place in a northern city among working-class people. The book was violently attacked by newspapers but was also much admired.
Ruth was another novel about the working class, centring on a 15-year-old orphan who has a child outside marriage. Gaskell's courageous aim was to show how easy it was for young girls to be used by wealthy men, but the book shocked many readers.
In 1850 Mrs Gaskell became a good friend of Charlotte Bronte, one of the nineteenth century's greatest writers. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte, written after Bronte's death, was received with great interest. The book played an important part in building Bronte's reputation and is regarded today as an excellent source of information about her.
Wives and Daughters, Gaskell's last novel, concerns two middle-class families in a country town, and shows Gaskell at her best as a natural storyteller and wonderfully sharp observer of country life and characters.
In North and South, the conditions of the cotton industry workers and their relationship with their employers are important subjects of the book. Milton-Northern, where the story takes place, is in fact the city of Manchester. Manchester was at the centre of the Industrial Revolution, which began in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and continued through the nineteenth century, transforming Britain into a country where goods were mass produced in factories using mechanical means. The most important industries were the cotton and wool industries, and these were based in northern towns whose populations increased rapidly as a result. Conditions among the factory workers were bad. In North and South, Gaskell uses the Higgins family to show the problems of the factory workers, their low wages, and their fight to talk with the cotton mill owners as equals. In the novel Mr Hale, Margaret's father, is a clergyman who develops such doubts about the Church of England that he feels forced to leave it, move to Milton-Northern and find work there as a tutor. In introducing this issue to the story, Gaskell was strongly influenced by Unitarianism which, although Christian, was in many ways different from the Church of England. Also important to Unitarianism was its emphasis on the importance of upbringing. In North and South Margaret is a very kind and loving person and has been brought up to visit the poor and sick, but her upbringing has also taught her to despise commerce, which to some extent explains her dislike of Mr Thornton. Part of Margaret's journey in the novel is to learn to respect people who are involved in trade, and to become less proud. Similarly, Mr Thornton has been brought up by his mother to despise people who are not successful, and this explains his contemptuous attitude towards his workers. Slowly, Mr Thornton begins to realise that the workers have human feelings as he does. He and Nicholas Higgins become friendly and he becomes persuaded of the importance of employers and workers 'talking freely to each other.' These changes in Margaret and Mr Thornton reflect the changes that Gaskell wanted to see in society: the northern mill
owners treating the workers better, and the south learning to respect the part that industry played in making the country rich.
In North and South, the author brilliantly combines the love story between two very strong, seemingly very different people and the social issues that were important to her.
