Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell was a Unitarian minister's wife in industrial Manchester, and she wrote the industrial city as someone who had been inside its houses. Mary Barton, begun after the death of her infant son, was published anonymously and caused an immediate quarrel: mill owners accused her of libel, and she had described what she had seen. North and South argued the same case more evenly, giving the manufacturer his own intelligence and his own conscience. Cranford, written in the same period, is a different instrument entirely, a small town of elderly women observed with an affection that never becomes sentimentality. She wrote the first biography of Charlotte Brontë, her friend, and had to withdraw the first edition under threat of legal action. She died at fifty-five, in a house she had bought secretly as a surprise for her husband.