Featured Reading Guide
Elizabeth Gaskell
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JENNY UGLOW Milton is a sooty, noisy northern town centred around the cotton mills that employ most of its inhabitants. Arriving from a rural idyll in the south, Margaret Hale is initially shocked by the social unrest and poverty she finds in her new hometown. However, as she begins to befriend her neighbours, and her stormy relationship with the mill-owner John Thornton develops, she starts to see Milton in a different light.
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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 Brontë, 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.
topAbout the Book
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JENNY UGLOW Milton is a sooty, noisy northern town centred around the cotton mills that employ most of its inhabitants. Arriving from a rural idyll in the south, Margaret Hale is initially shocked by the social unrest and poverty she finds in her new hometown. However, as she begins to befriend her neighbours, and her stormy relationship with the mill-owner John Thornton develops, she starts to see Milton in a different light.
topElizabeth Gaskell interview/review
Extract from Elizabeth Gaskell’s letter to her friend Emily:
‘I’ve got to (with Margaret – I’m off at her following your letter) when they’ve quarreled, silently, after the lie and she knows she loves him, and he is trying not to love her; and Frederick is gone back to Spain and Mrs Hale is dead and Mr Bell has come to stay with the Hales, and Mr Thornton ought to be developing himself – and Mr Hale ought to die – and if I could get over this next piece I could swim through the London life beautifully into sunset glory of the last scene. But hitherto Thornton is good; and I’m afraid of a touch marring him; and I want to keep his character consistent with itself, and large and strong and tender, and yet a master . That’s my next puzzle. I am enough on not to hurry’ (L321)
Elizabeth Gaskell began to feel that the story was not good enough and not her own. She told Dickens: ‘I dare say I shall like my story, when I am a little further from it; at present I can only feel depressed about it, I meant it to have been so much better.’ Later on, she softened towards the novel realising that the time restraints and other pressures of writing for a serial might have in fact been useful to the story’s development: ‘Now I am not sure if, when the barrier gives way between 2 such characters as Mr Thornton and Margaret it would not go all smash in a moment, – and I don’t feel certain that I dislike the end as it now stands.’
Extracts from Elizabeth Gaskell by Jenny Uglow (Faber, 1993), p.366 – 368
topStarting Points for Discussion
topOther Books by Elizabeth Gaskell
Mary Barton
Mary Barton is the pretty daughter of a factory worker who finds herself dr…
The Cranford Chronicles
Based on three Elizabeth Gaskell novels The Cranford Chronicles follows the…
Wives and Daughters
Set in the watchful society of Hollingford, this is a warm tale of love and …
Suggested Further Reading
- Hard Times ~ Charles Dickens
- Tess of the d’Urbervilles ~ Thomas Hardy (link to reading guide)
- The Mill on the Floss ~ George Eliot
- Pride and Prejudice ~ Jane Austen
- Elizabeth Gaskell ~ Jenny Uglow (Faber, 1993)
- Also:
- BBC series of North and South (2004) featured Daniela Denby-Ashe and Richard Armitage.