The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth GaskellJill L. Matus In the last few decades Elizabeth Gaskell has become a figure of growing importance in the field of Victorian literary studies. She produced work of great variety and scope in the course of a highly successful writing career that lasted for about twenty years from the mid-1840s to her unexpected death in 1865. The essays in this Companion draw on recent advances in biographical and bibliographical studies of Gaskell and cover the range of her impressive and varied output as a writer of novels, biography, short stories, and letters. The volume, which features well-known scholars in the field of Gaskell studies, focuses throughout on her narrative versatility and her literary responses to the social, cultural, and intellectual transformations of her time. This Companion will be invaluable for students and scholars of Victorian literature, and includes a chronology and guide to further reading. |
Contents
| 10 | |
Section 2 | 27 |
Section 3 | 46 |
Section 4 | 59 |
Section 5 | 75 |
Section 6 | 90 |
Section 7 | 108 |
Section 8 | 131 |
Section 9 | 148 |
Section 10 | 164 |
Section 11 | 178 |
Common terms and phrases
become biography Cecil Chapple character Charles Charlotte Brontë child consciousness Cousin Phillis Cranford critical cultural Cynthia death Dickens domestic duty E. C. Gaskell early Elizabeth Gaskell emotional England experience explores father feelings female feminine feminist fiction Gaskell wrote Gaskell's gender genius George Eliot Gibson girls Gothic Hamley Holdsworth Hollingford Household Words imaginative industrial Jane Jane Eyre Jenny Uglow John Kinraid Knutsford Lady Ludlow letters literary lives Lois the Witch London Manchester Margaret marriage married Mary Barton middle-class modern Molly Molly's moral mother narrative narrator nineteenth-century North and South novel novelist Oxford Patrick Brontë political Preston published readers representation responsibility Roger role Ruth Ruth's sexual shorter pieces sister social transformation society Stevenson story suffering suggests Sylvia's Lovers sympathy tale Thornton tion Unitarian University Press Victorian wife William Gaskell Wives and Daughters woman women writers working-class writing young