Gaskell, Mrs, novelist, was born at Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 29th September 1810. Her maiden name was Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson, and her father was in succession teacher, preacher, farmer, boarding-house keeper, writer, and Keeper of the Records to the Treasury. She was brought up by an aunt at Knutsford—the Cranford which she was yet to describe with such truthful patience; was carefully educated, and married in 1832 William Gaskell (1805–84), a Unitarian minister in Manchester. In 1848 she published anonymously her Mary Barton, which at once arrested public attention. It was followed by The Moorland Cottage (1850), Cranford (1853), Ruth (1853), North and South (1855), Round the Sofa (1859), Right at Last (1860), Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Cousin Phillis (1865), and Wives and Daughters (1865), a series of novels that have permanently enriched English literature, and almost lifted their authoress into a rank represented alone by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and
George Eliot. Mrs Gaskell had some measure of almost all the gifts of the great novelist—deep and genuine pathos, a singularly genial and truthful humour, a graceful and unforced style, power of description, dramatic faculty on occasion, and sympathetic insight into character; while she wrote of nothing that she did not know and understand—indeed many passages are close transcripts from her own life-history and experience. Though written with a purpose, her novels have not failed to be completely artistic, perhaps because they flowed so freely from her heart, and because their purpose was so truly and so much herself. Mrs Gaskell died suddenly of heart-disease at Holybourne, Alton, in Hampshire, 12th November 1865, and was fittingly buried at Knutsford. Besides her novels she wrote The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), which will remain one of the masterpieces of English biography. Mary Barton was received as a revelation of the habits, thoughts, privations, and struggles of the industrial poor, as these are to be found in such a social beehive as Manchester, and has had many imitators, but not an equal.