North and South

Gaskell saw the emotional and economic realities of ordinary life with a steely honesty * The Times *Ruth, North and South and Mary Barton are at least as good as any of Dickens’s novels – Sara ParetskyPah! to Dickens. Eat your heart out, Little Nell. That Elizabeth Gaskell could write a death scene to make your socks melt * Scotsman *One of the most perceptive novels of the mid-Victorian era * Glasgow Herald *North And South explores themes that still seem strikingly modern. One hundred and fifty years after it appeared, the North-South divide - and the social and economic gulf it implies - remains intact * Daily Mail *

Elizabeth Gaskell was born on 29 September 1810 in London. She was brought up in Knutsford, Cheshire by her aunt after her mother died when she was two years old. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, who was a Unitarian minister like her father. After their marriage they lived in Manchester with their children. Elizabeth Gaskell published her first novel, Mary Barton, in 1848 to great success. She went on to publish much of her work in Charles Dickens’s magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round. Along with short stories and a biography of Charlotte Bronte, she published five more novels including North and South (1855) and Wives and Daughters (1866). Wives and Daughters is unfinished as Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly of heart failure on 12 November 1865.