Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was the youngest of eight children, but only she and one of her brothers lived past infancy. Her father was a minister in Lancashire before becoming the Keeper of Treasury Records, and her mother came from a prominent family. Her mother died a little over a year her birth. Her father panicked and sent Elizabeth off to live with Hannah Lumb, her aunt on her mother’s side. She would spend the rest of her youth living as a guest in her aunt and grandparent’s home, causing her future to seem rather uncertain, as she didn’t have any personal wealth or a permanent home. Elizabeth went many years without seeing her father, but her brother John visited her often until he went missing in 1827 while on an expedition with the Merchant Navy to India. Elizabeth received the standard education of a young woman from a wealthy family, and her father and aunt encouraged her to pursue her writing. In 1832, she married a minister named William Gaskell and settled in Manchester. Her first daughter was stillborn; however, she would go on to have four healthy daughters. In 1835, Gaskell started a diary to document her life as a parent and her observations of her children, specifically the relationship between her two eldest daughters. She co-authored a series of poems titled Sketches among the Poor with her husband in 1836. Her first work was published in 1840 under the authorship of “a Lady.” In 1841, they moved to Germany, and the literature she encountered there influenced her short stories which she published under the pseudonym Cotton Mather Mills. The death of her infant son, William, inspired Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, which was very successful. In 1850, the Gaskells were back in Manchester, where she wrote the remainder of her works and became well-connected to other writers. She died of a heart attack in 1865.