Biographie d'Elizabeth Gaskell

ELIZABETH GASKELL was born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson in 1810. The Daughter of a Unitarian, who was a civil servant and journalist, she was brought up after her mother's death by her aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire, which became the model Rot only for Cranford but also for Hollingford (in Wives and Daughters). In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister in Manchester, with whom she lived very happily. Her first novel, Mary Barton, published in 1848, was immensely popular and brought her to the attention of Charles Dickens, who was looking for contributors to his new periodical, Household Words, for which she wrote the famous series of papers subsequently reprinted as Cranford. Her later novels include Ruth (1853), North and South (1854-5), Sylvia 's Lovers (1863), and Wives and Daughters (1864-6). She also wrote many stories and her remarkable Life of Charlotte Brontë. She died in 1865. ALAN SHELSTON is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. He has edited Thomas Carlyle's Selected Writings and Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë. RAPHAEL taught French language and literature at the universities of Glasgow and London, specializing in nineteenth century literature. Her translations include Balzac's Eugénie Grandet and La Cousine Bette, as well as Sand's Mauprat and Madame de Staël's Corinne. NAOMI SCHOR is William Hanes Wanna maker Professor of Romance Studies and Literature at Duke University. Her publications include Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1987) and George Sand and Idealism (1993).