Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Gaskell
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Standard Name: Gaskell, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson
Nickname: Lily
Married Name: Elizabeth Gaskell
Indexed Name: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Pseudonym: Cotton Mather Mills
Pseudonym: The Author of Mary Barton etc.
Self-constructed Name: E. C. Gaskell
Elizabeth Gaskell
, one of the foremost fiction-writers of the mid-Victorian period, produced a corpus of seven novels, numerous short stories, and a controversial biography of Charlotte Brontë
. She wrote extensively for periodicals, as well as producing novels directly for the book market, often on issues of burning interest: her industrial novels appeared in the midst of fierce debate over class relations, factory conditions and legislation; Ruth took a fallen woman and mother as its protagonist just as middle-class feminist critique of gender roles emerged. Gaskell occupies a bridging position between Harriet Martineau
and George Eliot
in the development of the domestic novel.
IB
describes the same industrial, working-class Manchester that novelists like Elizabeth Gaskell
and social investigators like Friedrich Engels
and Dr James P. Kay-Shuttleworth
had already made famous in works such as Gaskell's Mary Barton...
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Dorothy L. Sayers
Here she mounts a powerful appreciation of the novel, both for its importance in the development of the detective story (all the clues, she says, are clearly conveyed to the reader, something which seldom happened...
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Isabella Banks
The novel's heroine, Muriel D'Anyer, comes from the manufacturing middle class of Manchester that IB
herself was born into. Muriel is educated by her energetic grandmother, Sarah Bancroft, who successfully runs the family business. In...
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Marghanita Laski
The book aims at literary recuperation. Here ML
blends analysis with celebration, but she recalls her marginalised writers primarily to raise questions about the present state of writing for children. She says that her subjects...
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Ann Gomersall
After Fanny drops Charles for somebody of her own class, his father's death brings him the revelation that he is illegitimate: he must be reduced to the necessity of living by his industry!
qtd. in
Gomersall, Ann. The Citizen. Scatcherd and Whitaker, 1790, 2 vols.
1: 126
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Jessie Fothergill
Of particular interest is JF
's handling of the benefits of cross-class mutual aid and moral principle
Debenham, Helen. “’Almost always two sides to a question’: the novels of Jessie Fothergill”. Popular Victorian Women Writers, edited by Kay Boardman and Shirley Jones, Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 66-89.
76
as rich and poor, male and female, employer and workers, civil authorities and landowners join forces against...
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Patricia Beer
PB
here considers a series of canonical authors, Austen
, Eliot
, Charlotte Brontë
, and Elizabeth Gaskell
, and the way that the Woman Question was handled in fiction. Critic John Mullan
notes her...
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Isak Dinesen
Stambaugh remarks that all the stories here are studies, specifically, of women's destinies.
Stambaugh, Sara. The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen. UMI Research Press, 1988.
28
The final, short one, The Ring, concerns a young woman, Lovisa, whose idyllic, clandestine courtship has recently ended in marriage...
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Flora Macdonald Mayor
The Rector's Daughter showcases once again FMM
's ability to make literature and her own experiences immediately relevant, as well as her outspokenness. Condensing the friction between the dying Victorian world and the modern world...
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George Eliot
This story is equally remarkable for the portraits of Mr Tryan (the Evangelical clergyman who not only converts Janet to his beliefs but succeeds in sparking her will to regeneration) and of Janet herself, but...
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Charlotte Brontë
The novel focuses on the Luddite riots in Yorkshire in the Napoleonic era. Shirley Keeldar, an heiress with a man's name who revels in her unconventionality (and who was, according to conversation Elizabeth Gaskell
had...
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Anne Mozley
The review of Adam Bede is indeed most perceptive as well as detailed. AM
begins by noticing how novels have been expanding their empire: how many have been added to their readership by the newer...
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Vera Brittain
In her Prologue, VB
cited Mrs Gaskell
's Life of Charlotte Brontë as an influence. She also lamented the absence of positive representations of female friendship: I hope that Winifred's story may do something to...
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Julia Wedgwood
JW
was an energetic letter writer. Her letters to Emelia Russell Gurney
, which cover an eleven-year span beginning in 1865, were collected by Gurney's niece in 1902. Wedgwood's sketch of Linlathen (Thomas Erskine
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Elizabeth Stone
Critic Monica Correa Fryckstedt
considers ESthe first Manchester resident to write a novel about the manufacturing districts . . . . she conveys a vivid picture of the rising Lancashire cottonocracy.
Fryckstedt, Monica Correa. “The Early Industrial Novel: Mary Barton and Its Predecessors”. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol.
