Brief Biography of Elizabeth Gaskell

ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810-65)

Tatsuhiro Ohno

Elizabeth Stevenson was born to a former Unitarian minister as his youngest daughter in London in 1810. After the loss of her mother at the age of one, she was brought up by her aunt who lived in Knutsford, a country town in the suburb of Manchester. Her childhood and adolescence were generally happy except when she encountered the loss of her only brother and had to bear discomfort of meeting her mother-in-law and her half brother and sister. At the age of twenty-one, she married William Gaskell, a junior minister of Manchester's Unitarian Chapel, and started a new life there. Apart from the ups and downs of everyday married life, she lived happily in the industrial city. At the age of thirty-four, she lost her nine-month-old son. Mary Barton (1848), which was written in the effort to forget her grief, marked her debut as a novelist. This novel won critical acclaim. After that, she began to associate with Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, and was to write further 48 works, including novels like Ruth (1853), North and South (1855), Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1866), approximately forty shorter fictions such as Cranford (1853) and Cousin Phillis (1863), and the biography The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857). It is critics' confirmed opinion that the Brontes' life was introduced to the public by this work of the celebrated Mrs Gaskell. She passed away suddenly in the company of her daughters at the age of fifty-five in the country house she purchased in Hampshire. "Compassion for the suffering" and "faith in God" are the two main streams flowing through her literary works.

Her Portrait	Elizabeth Gaskell	William Gaskell