GASKELL, ELIZABETH CLEGHORN (STEVENS ON) (1810-1865)

—Novelist, dau. of William Stevens on, a Unitarian minister, and for some time Keeper of the Treasury Records. She m. William G., a Unitarian minister, at Manchester, and in 1848 pub. anonymously her first book, Mary Barton , in which the life and feelings of the manufacturing working cla es are depicted with much power and sympathy. Other novels followed, Lizzie Leigh (1855), Mr. Harrison's Confe ions (1865), Ruth (1853), Cranford (1851-3), North and South (1855), Sylvia's Lovers (1863), etc. Her last work was Wives and Daughters (1865), which appeared in the Corn hill Magazine , and was left unfinished. Mrs. G. had some of the characteristics of Mi Austen, and if her style and delineation of character are le minutely perfect, they are, on the other hand, imbued with a deeper vein of feeling. She was the friend of Charlotte Bronté ( q.v. ), to whom her sympathy brought much comfort, and whose Life she wrote. Of Cranford Lord Houghton wrote, "It is the finest piece of humoristic description that has been added to British literature since Charles Lamb."