Contents.--v.1. History, travel & description.

The letters of the four Gaskell daughters open a door into the social and cultural lives of a well-connected middle-class Victorian family. Events that impinged on the lives and the letters of these women include the Indian Mutiny, the assassination of Lincoln, the Franco-Prussian War, the Boer Wars and Fenian agitation. They witnessed the effects in England of the American Civil War, and engaged in the religious controversies of the day. They take a close interest in the impact of Darwin's discoveries, discuss the latest news, Ruskin's lectures on Venice, the Pre-Raphaelites, and what it is like to play Beethoven's piano pieces under Sir Charles Halle's tuition. They also shed light on the network of Unitarian friends and scholars who undertook the stewardship of Elizabeth Gaskell's writing. This richly annotated edition will appeal to anyone interested in Transatlantic relations, in Mrs Gaskell, in women's networking, in Victorian ideas and social life, and in the intellectual culture of dissenting circles.

First published in 1975, this book places Elizabeth Gaskell amongst the major novelists of the nineteenth-century. It considers how she has sometimes been overlooked, or admired for very few of her works, or for reasons that are not in fact central to her art. W. A. Craik looks at Gaskell’s full-length novels with three main purposes: to analyse her development as a novelist, her achievements, and the nature of her very original work; to see what she owes to earlier novelists, what she learns from them, and how far she is an innovator; and to put her in relation to those other novelists who write on similar themes with comparable aims. This book establishes Elizabeth Gaskelll’s excellence in comparison with her peers by demonstrating how far she extended the possibilities of the novel, both in materials and techniques.