Elizabeth Gaskell Research Paper

Elizabeth Gaskell Elizabeth Gaskell was a writer from the Victorian Period. She was a woman with a great passion for social causes such as women’s issues and the inequalities of class and gender. She expressed her passions on these subjects through the writing of most of her novels. A few of these works such as Ruth and The Life of Charlotte Bronte proved to be very controversial and had a negative effect on her writing career. She was a wife, mother, and author, which she took all of these rolls seriously. The focus of this paper will be on each of these rolls and one of her controversial novels, Ruth. Did she push the social buttons with her writing of Ruth, and some of her other novels during such a prudish time in the Victorian period?

She developed friendships with “Charlotte Bronte, John Ruskin, the Carlyles, Charles Kingsley, and Florence Knightingale” (The Gaskell Society- Life & Works, n.d.). She was very good friends with Charlotte Bronte, so at the time of Charlotte’s death, her father asked Elizabeth to write about his daughter’s death. She took on this task, and published The Life of Charlotte Bronte in 1857. She had a professional relationship with Charles Dickens that developed in the early years of her writing career. The writing of Mary Barton had caught his attention and “it was at his invitation that much of her work was first published in Household Words and All the Year Round” (The Gaskell Society- Life & Works, n.d.). Dickens was very instrumental in Elizabeth’s popularity, especially with her writings of ghost stories. However, the relationship with Dickens was not a smooth one. Dickens reportedly said “to his sub editor, “oh! Mrs. Gaskell-fearful-fearful! If were Mr. G. oh heavens how I would beat her!” (The Gaskell Society- Life & Works, n.d.). Dickens still continued to publish her works up until a report appeared in a newspaper concerning some domestic issues he was having with his wife. Elizabeth did not like the way Dickens treated his wife, or the statements he had made to the paper. Not long after this article, Elizabeth started sending her stories to The Cornhill magazine. By the time she reached age

(Pollard, 1987, p. 201)

The whole consensus was that women writers should maintain the ideology of love and marriage as the basis for their writing. Elizabeth went outside of this idea of thinking in all of her novels. Her first novel was Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester life, which she gained fame along with criticism because “she pricked the conscience of industrial England through her depiction and analysis of the working class” (Elizabeth Gaskell: Biography, n.d.). She wrote about what she saw within the city, concerning the relationships between the two classes. She continued to write about these social issues when she published North and South in 1855. Her style of writing raised her to the status of being a leader in social