Elizabeth Gaskell was a Victorian writer, mother, wife of a Unitarian minister, colleague and rival of Charles Dickens, and social activist.
She was born in London in 1810, the daughter of a Unitarian minister. Her mother died soon after the birth, and she was raised by an aunt in Knutsford. Her happy memories of Knutsford inspired
Cranford, her best known work.
In 1832 she married William Gaskell, and they settled in the industrial city of Manchester where she lived until shortly before her death in 1865, busy in motherhood and being a minister's wife. The death of her only son in infancy strengthened her sense of identity with the poor and her desire to relieve their suffering, and her husband encouraged her to write. Her most prominent traits were compassion and tolerance.
Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales (in a longer edition) was the first of five collections of Mrs Gaskell's shorter fiction published during her life. The 1865 edition contains the novella 'Lizzie Leigh', and a paper and six short stories: 'The Well of Pen-Mortha', 'The Heart of John Middleton', 'The Old Nurse's Story', 'Traits and Stories of the Huguenots', 'Morton Hall', 'My French Master', and 'The Squire's Story'.
The source texts were PG 2521-h.htm and texts from the University of Oxford Text Archive and the University of Adelaide, checked against the 1865 Smith Elder and Co. edition. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, restored diacritics and italics, used British English, and made changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.
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