Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born on 29 September 1810 in Chelsea, London, the youngest of eight children, of whom only she and her brother John survived infancy. Her father, William Stevenson, was a Unitarian who became Keeper of the Treasury Records. Her mother died 13 months after Elizabeth's birth, and the baby was sent to live with her aunt, Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, Cheshire, where she spent much of her childhood.

In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister, and they settled in Manchester, whose industrial surroundings shaped her writing. The death of their baby son was the catalyst for her first novel, Mary Barton, published anonymously in 1848, which sold thousands of copies. Charles Dickens then published much of her work in his journal Household Words. Charlotte Brontë was a friend, and at her father's request Gaskell wrote The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857).

Cranford appeared in Household Words between 1851 and 1853, and its town is based on Knutsford. North and South (1854-1855) is one of the first industrial novels to describe the conflict between employers and workers. One unsigned review of the novel claimed that a woman could not understand industrial problems.

Gaskell died of a heart attack on 12 November 1865. In the late 19th century her novels, except Cranford, slipped into obscurity, until critics in the 1950s and 1960s looked again at how she wrote about social and industrial problems. In 2010 a memorial to her was unveiled in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Sources: wikipedia.org