Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

Looking for an engaging and emotionally resonant read from a novelist who was inspired by the works of both Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte? Elizabeth Gaskell's 1850 short novel The Moorland Cottage offers up a unflinching slice of nineteenth-century family life, with a particular focus on family dynamics in an era where sons were openly favored.

Can't get enough of nineteenth-century British romance? Lovers of books like Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights should give Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters a try. This tale follows the romantic ups and downs of Molly Gibson, a doctor's daughter who lives in a small English village and is trying desperately to find the right husband.

Ruth by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

I am an old woman now, and things are very different to what they  were in my youth.  Then we, who travelled, travelled in coaches,  carrying six inside, and making a two days' journey out of what  people now go over in a couple of hours with a whizz and a flash, and  a screaming whistle, enough to deafen one.

Half a life-time ago, there lived in one of the Westmoreland dales a single woman, of the name of Susan Dixon. She was owner of the small farm-house where she resided, and of some thirty or forty acres of land by which it was surrounded. She had also an hereditary right to a sheep-walk, extending to the wild fells that overhang Blea Tarn. In the language of the country she was a Stateswoman. Her house is yet to be seen on the Oxenfell road, between Skelwith and Coniston. You go along a moorland track, made by the carts that occasionally came for turf from the Oxenfell. A brook babbles and brattles by the wayside, giving you a sense of companionship, which relieves the deep solitude in which this way is usually traversed. Some miles on this side of Coniston there is a farmstead — a gray stone house, and a square of farm-buildings surrounding a green space of rough turf, in the midst of which stands a mighty, funereal umbrageous yew, making a solemn shadow, as of death, in the very heart and centre of the light and heat of the brightest summer day. On the side away from the house, this yard slopes down to a dark-brown pool, which is supplied with fresh water from the overflowings of a stone cistern, into which some rivulet of the brook before-mentioned continually and melodiously falls bubbling. The cattle drink out of this cistern. The household bring their pitchers and fill them with drinking-water by a dilatory, yet pretty, process. The water-carrier brings with her a leaf of the hound’s-tongue fern, and, inserting it in the crevice of the gray rock, makes a cool, green spout for the sparkling stream.

Nineteen-year-old Margaret Hale happily returns home from London to the idyllic southern village of Helstone after her cousin Edith marries Captain Lennox. She lived for almost 10 years in the city with Edith and wealthy Aunt Shaw to learn to be a young lady. Margaret has refused an offer of marriage from the captain's brother, Henry, an up-and-comng barrister. Her life is turned upside down when her father, the local pastor, leaves the Church of England and the rectory of Helstone as a matter of conscience; his intellectual honesty has made him a dissenter. At the suggestion of Mr. Bell, his old friend from Oxford, he settles with his wife and daughter in Milton-Northern (where Mr. Bell was born and owns property). The industrial town in Darkshire (a textile-producing region) manufactures cotton and is in the middle of the Industrial Revolution; masters and workers are clashing in the first organised strikes.

Wives and Daughters was first published serially in the Cornhill Magazine from August, 1864, to January, 1866. Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly in November, 1865. She had completed all but the last chapter, and in that sense the book, which many consider her masterpiece, is unfinished.

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