The motherless child was sent to live with Aunt Lumb, her mother's sister, in rural Cheshire. A year after Elizabeth was born, the poor woman died from exhaustion.

She was her 40-year-old mother's eighth child in 13 years, six of whom had died. She was born as Elizabeth Stevenson in 1810 in Chelsea, daughter of an eccentric, bookish man, who worked for the Treasury in Whitehall. Beneath the surface, her life was beset by tragedies. The family bliss disguised terrible demons. Yet if this gives the author a cosy image it would be misleading. Mrs Gaskell was a satirist, but a gentle one. Now it has been lovingly and scintillatingly brought to life in a BBC1 TV drama, with Dame Judi Dench and Dame Eileen Atkins, on Sunday nights.Īll the Cranford women are single, and their gossip, their snobberies, their foibles and their worries are exposed to laughter, but not ridicule. She created the town of Cranford - based on Knutsford in Cheshire where she spent the most formative years of her childhood and often returned to as an adult. Married to a minister, bringing up four children, keeping hearth and home, engaging herself in charity, the author of Cranford embodied old-fashioned femininity.įrom the comfort of that married bliss, she ran a canny eye over the outside world, its quirks and its characters, especially those souls who, unlike her, were without men. It distinguished her from other women writers of the time, such as Jane Austen and George Eliot, who were spinsters and childless.Īnd it was true. The clue was in the name she used on her books - not Elizabeth Gaskell but Mrs Gaskell. On the surface, she was the ideal Victorian wife and mother, a 19th-century domestic goddess.

Novelist of cranford