Elizabeth Gaskell: A Rebellious Heart

The life of the novelist (and biographer of Charlotte Brontë) Elizabeth Gaskell was very far from that of the Victorian housewife of popular imagination: here for first time is the true story of Mrs. Gaskell that her family did their best to keep secret.

In a literary career that didn’t begin until she was nearly forty, Elizabeth Gaskell published six novels (of which North and South is probably the most highly regarded), several novellas, short stories and essays, and a ground-breaking, wildly controversial biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë—until her sudden death, aged fifty-five, hundreds of miles from home in a house that she had bought without her husband’s knowledge.

Since the last major biography of Gaskell—Jenny Uglow’s Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories was published over thirty years ago—archival resources have opened up in an unprecedented way. Trawling through these, Helena Kelly has pieced together for the first time the true story of Mrs. Gaskell’s life and work that her family did their best to keep secret.

Sometimes described as composing novels like "Jane Austen with factories,” she was famous, influential, and critically esteemed in her life time, but history has not been kind to her. Thanks largely to the verdict of the literary critic David Cecil, who in the 1930s declared her "all a woman was expected to be; gentle, domestic, tactful, unintellectual, prone to tears, easily shocked"—that is, the ideal Victorian wife and mother—both Elizabeth Gaskell and her writing have been widely misunderstood and underrated.

In this book Helena intends to set the record straight, showing Mrs. Gaskell—“Lily” to her friends—to be an original thinker and literary talent who decided to pursue her own desires and creativity regardless of convention, wresting professional success and personal independence from a society that sought to deny her both.