Elizabeth
Gaskell was a Victorian novelist
whose masterpieces, “Mary Barton”, which was first published anonymously, and
“North and South”, are vivid accounts of poverty in Manchester and reflect her
political foresight in the changing Industrial Age. She is much-loved by readers
and fans of costume drama, and she is regarded as a daring pioneer, determined
to speak out against injustice.
Unlike the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell was fiercely and explicitly concerned with the present and its problems. Her novels sit alongside those by Charles Dickens: works written in the mid-nineteenth-century that portrayed relations between rich and poor in a country transformed by industrialisation. Though this transformation had begun several decades earlier, it attracted renewed attention because of a severe economic depression in the eighteen-forties and a resulting increase in the spread and depth of urban poverty.
Unlike the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell was fiercely and explicitly concerned with the present and its problems. Her novels sit alongside those by Charles Dickens: works written in the mid-nineteenth-century that portrayed relations between rich and poor in a country transformed by industrialisation. Though this transformation had begun several decades earlier, it attracted renewed attention because of a severe economic depression in the eighteen-forties and a resulting increase in the spread and depth of urban poverty.
She died on 12 November 1865,
when she was just 55.
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