Authors: Elizabeth Gaskell
Gothic Tales
GOTHIC TALES
ELIZABETH CLEGHORN GASKELL
was born in London in 1810, but she spent her formative years in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon and the north of England. In 1832 she married the Reverend William Gaskell, who became well known as the minister of the Unitarian Chapel in Cross Street, Manchester. For the first sixteen years of her marriage, she combined the activities of motherhood, the management of a busy household and parish work in an area notorious for its poverty and appalling living conditions. She also travelled and started to write.
Mary Barton
, her first full-length fiction, published in 1848 and set in industrial Manchester, was an instant success. Two years later she began writing for Dickens's magazine,
Household Words
, to which she contributed fiction for the next thirteen years; her most notable work being another novel of Manchester industrial life,
North and South
(1855). In 1850 she met Charlotte Brontë, who became a close friend until the latter's death in 1855. Soon after this, Gaskell was chosen by Patrick Brontë to write
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
(1857), a carefully researched and sympathetic account of this probing and sympathetic account of this great Victorian novelist. Gaskell's position as a minister's wife and as a successful writer gave her a wide circle of friends, both from the professional world of Manchester and the larger literary world. She was a committed and uncompromising artist, as Dickens discovered when, as editor of
Household Words
, he unsuccessfully tried to impose his views on her. She proved that she was not to be bullied, even by a man of such genius as he. Her later works
Sylvia's Lovers
(1863),
Cousin Phillis
(1864) and
Wives and Daughters
(1866), are usually considered to be her finest, revealing developments in narrative technique and subtleties of character portrayal. Gaskell died suddenly in November 1865 at Alton, Hampshire, in the house that she had bought with her literary eatnings.
LAURA KRANZLER
received her D.Phil. on Gothic Fiction from Hertford College, Oxford. She has written articles on Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
and the literary theory of Virginia Woolf, and is the author of two novels.
ELIZABETH GASKELL
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
LAURA KRANZLER
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Published in Penguin Classics 2000
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5
Introduction and Notes copyright © Laura Kranzler, 2000
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1810 | 29 September: |
1811 | October: |
1814 | William Stevenson marries Catherine Thomson |
1821â6 | Elizabeth attends Byerley sisters' boarding school (school near Warwick, but moves to Avonbank, Stratford-upon-Avon in 1824) |
1822 | Brother, John Stevenson (b. 1799), joins Merchant Navy |
1828 | John Stevenson disappears on a voyage to India; no definitive information about his fate |
1829 | March: |
 | Elizabeth stays with uncle in Park Lane, London and visits relations, the Turners, at Newcastle upon Tyne |
1831 | Visits Edinburgh with Ann Turner; has bust sculpted by David Dunbar, and her miniature painted by stepmother's brother, William John Thomson; visits Ann Turner's sister and brother-in-law, Unitarian minister John Robberds, in Manchester, where she meets Revd William Gaskell (1805â84) |
1832 | 30 August: |
1833 | 10 July: |
1834 | 12 September: |
1835 | Starts |
1837 | January: |
 | 7 February: |
 | 1 May: |
1840 | âClopton Hall' in William Howitt's |
1841 | July: |
1842 | 7 October: |
 | Family moves to 121 Upper Rumford Road, Manchester |
1844 | 23 October: |
1845 | 10 August: |
1846 | 3 September: |
1848 | October: Mary Barton |
1849 | April-May: |
 | June-August: |
1850 | June: |
 | 19 August: |
1851 | June: |
 | July: |
 | October: |
 | December-May 1853: Cranford |
1852 | December: |
1853 | January: Ruth |
 | April: |
 | May: |
 | June: Cranford |
 | September: |
 | December: |
1854 | January: |
1855 | February: |
 | June: |
 | Patrick Brontë |
 | September: Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales |
1856 | 1 January: |
 | May: |
 | December: |
1857 | FebruaryâMay: |
1858 | January: |
 | September-December: |
1859 | March: Round the Sofa and Other Tales |
 | Summer: |
 | October: |
 | November: |
 | Lovers |
 | December: |
 | Christmas Number of |
1860 | February: |
 | May: Right at Last and Other Tales |
 | July-August: |
1861 | January: |
1862 | Visits Paris, Brittany and Normandy to conduct research for articles on French life |
1863 | February: Sylvia's Lovers |
 | March-August: |
1864 | Cousin Phillis |
 | August: |
 | August-January 1866: Wives and Daughters |
1865 | March-April: |
 | June: |
 | October: |
 | 12 November: |
 | 16 November: |
 | Cousin Phillis, and Other Tales |
1866 | February: Wives and Daughters: An Every-day Story |