GASKELL, ELIZABETH CLEGHORN English novelist and biographer, was born on Sept. 29, 181o, in a house in Lindsay row, Chelsea, London ; now 93 Cheyne walk. Her father, William Stevenson (1772-1829), had been successively Unitarian minister, farmer, boarding-house keeper for students at Edinburgh, editor of the Scots Magazine, and contributor to the Edinburgh Review before he received the post of keeper of the records to the Treasury, which he held until his death. His first wife, Elizabeth Holland, died a month after her daughter, Eliza beth, was born, and the babe was taken to Knutsford, Cheshire, to be adopted by her maternal aunt, Mrs. Lumb. Thus her child hood was spent in the environment idealized in Cranford. From 1824 to 1826 Elizabeth went to school at Stratford-on-Avon, from 1827 to 1829 she lived in London with her father and his second wife ; and after two winters at Newcastle-on-Tyne in the family of William Turner, a Unitarian minister, and a third in Edin burgh, she married, on Aug. 30, 1832, William Gaskell, minister of the Unitarian chapel in Cross street, Manchester, and from 1846 to 1853 professor of English history and literature in Man chester New college. They lived first in Dover street, then in Rumford street, and finally, in 185o, at 84 Plymouth grove.
Mrs. Gaskell and her husband thought to emulate George Crabbe and write the annals of the Manchester poor, but only one poetic "sketch" appeared (Blackwood's Magazine, 1837). In 1844, while they were visiting North Wales, their infant son died, and to distract Mrs. Gaskell from her sorrow her husband sug gested a long work of fiction. Hence Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life was begun. It was published in 2 vols., 1848 ; its appeal for neighbourly love, its dramatic power and humour winning for the author the friendship of Carlyle, Landor and Dickens. Dickens asked her, in 185o, to contribute to his new magazine, Household Words, and here the whole of Cranford appeared at intervals from Dec. 1851 to May 1853, exclusive of one sketch, reprinted in the "World's Classics" edition (19o7), that was published in All the Year Round for Nov. 1863. Cran ford is an English classic. It is a picture of Knutsford indeed, but a work of imagination that has a place in literature beside the much earlier work of Jane Austen. In Ruth (1853) Mrs. Gaskell again presents Knutsford, thinly disguised, and the little Unitarian chapel in that town. North and South, a powerful tale of the industrial revolution, first published serially in Household Words, was separately published in Then came—in 1857—the Life of Charlotte Brontë, in two volumes. Two years earlier Miss Bronte had begged her publishers to postpone the issue of her own novel, Villette, in order that her friend's Ruth should not suffer. This biography, by its vivid pres entation of the tragic story of the three Brontë sisters, gave its author a place among English biographers.
In 1863 Mrs. Gaskell published her last long novel, Sylvia's Lovers, a romantic tale of Whitby smugglers and the press-gang riots. In the same year a one-volume story, A Dark Night's Work, and Cousin Phyllis and other Tales, appeared.
Mrs. Gaskell died on Nov. 12, 1865, at Holyburn, Alton, Hants, and was buried in the graveyard of the Knutsford Unitarian church. Her unfinished novel, Wives and Daughters, was pub lished in 2 vols. in 1866.
See J. A. Payne, Mrs. Gaskell and Knutsford (2nd ed., E. H. Chadwick, Mrs. Gaskell (2nd ed., 1913, with bibliography) and Gerard DeWitt Sanders, Elizabeth Gaskell (193o) .