A revolutionary social and political commentary, North and South solidified Gaskell's place in the company of Victorian England's finest novelists. This Norton Critical Edition of her best-selling novel is annotated and edited by preeminent Gaskell scholar Alan Shelston. "Contexts" includes contemporary reviews and correspondence related to North and South, along with the full text of Gaskell's 1850 short story "Lizzie Leigh," which, like North and South, is set in industrial Manchester and deals with strong working women. This topic is further addressed in Bessie Rayner Parkes's essay on Victorian working women."Criticism" collects eleven assessments of the novel, among them Louis Cazamian's 1904 study of industrial fiction and Hilary Schor's recent study of North and South in the context of discourse analysis.A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included
When her father leaves the Church, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the North of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. In North and South skilfully fused individual feeling with social concern, and in Margaret Hale, has created one of the most original heroines of Victorian literature.
Elizabeth Gaskell escribió alrededor de treinta historias cortas; muchas de ellas para las revistas de Charles Dickens: Household Words y All the Year Round. La presente selección incluye cuatro de sus mejores relatos. En Lizzie Leigh, La Rama torcida y Hace media vida podemos apreciar su arte y su habilidad tanto para lo cómico, lo trágico, lo macabro y lo idílico; el ambiente de provincias, los cambios que se suceden y su maestría no sólo para trazar personajes femeninos,sino para captar sus sentimientos ,su variedad y riqueza de matices. En La historia de la vieja niñera, muestra no sólo su deslumbramiento por lo sobrenatural, sino, como en ningún otro de sus relatos, su virtuosismo narrativo para entrelazar el humor, el miedo y el terror.
A was powerfully moving novel of a young woman caught between the attractions of two very different men, Sylvias Lovers is set in the 1790s in an English seaside town. England is at war with France, and press-gangs wreak havoc by seizing young men for service. One of their victims is a whaling harpooner named Charley Kinraid, whose charm and vivacity have captured the heart of Sylvia Robson. But Sylvias devoted cousin, Philip Hepburn, hopes to marry her himself and, in order to win her, deliberately withholds crucial informationwith devastating consequences.
Wives and Daughters, generally thought to be Elizabeth Gaskell's finest, is a departure from her earlier 'social' fiction, such as Mary Barton and North and South. Set in English society before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters centres on the story of youthful Molly Gibson, brought up from childhood by her father. When he remarries, a new step-sister enters Molly's quiet life - loveable, but worldly and troubling, Cynthia. The narrative traces the development of the two girls into womanhood within the gossiping and watchful society of Hollingford. Wives and Daughters is far more than a nostalgic evocation of village life; it offers an ironic critique of mid-Victorian society. 'No nineteenth-century novel contains a more devastating rejection than this of the Victorian male assumption of moral authority', writes Pam Morris in her introduction to this new edition, in which she explores the novel's main themes - the role of women, Darwinism and the concept of Englishness - and its literary and social context.
"The curse - the curse!" I looked up in terror. In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked, fearful self' An encounter with the supernatural in an everyday setting accentuates its strangeness; a truth used to eerie effect in Gaskell's Gothic tales. A portrait turned to the wall, a hidden manuscript, a mysterious child that lives on the freezing moors, a doppelganger formed by a woman's bitter curse: all of these things hint at male tyranny and woman as avenging angel - or devil. Gaskell was fascinated by the dualities in women's lives and the way in which fact and fiction merge. 'Disappearances', a mix of gossip, legend and fact, relates stories of mysterious vanishings, 'Lois the Witch', based on an account of the Salem witch hunts, shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to communal hysteria and persecution, while 'The Grey Woman' explores a common Gothic theme, the way in which the ghosts of the past always return to haunt us. This edition includes an introduction, chronology, explanatory notes and an appendix giving a reader's response to 'Disappearances'.
