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  • Published: 15 July 1994
  • ISBN: 9781857151855
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 424
  • RRP: $35.00

Mary Barton




The new paperback series: Penguin English Library

Published in 1848, MARY BARTON was the first novel of Elizabeth Gaskell, later to become celebrated as the author of CRANFORD, MARY BARTON - a better book than CRANFORD - was written after she has married a Manchester clergyman, and it conbines a typically sturdy romantic plot with striking descriptions of working people and their lives as she had encountered them in northern mills. Despite this grim setting, the book has all this author's well-known charm and considerable power to involve the reader in the lives of her characters. More accessible than George Eliot, less frenzied than Charlotte Bronte, Mrs Gaskell is a novelist whose wit, human warmth and sharp eye for detail bring ordinary experience to vivid life.

  • Published: 15 July 1994
  • ISBN: 9781857151855
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 424
  • RRP: $35.00

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About the author

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born in London in 1810, but she spent her formative years in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon and the north of England. In 1832 she married the Reverend William Gaskell, who became well known as the minister of the Unitarian Chapel in Manchester's Cross Street. As well as leading a busy domestic life as minister's wife and mother of four daughters, she worked among the poor, traveled frequently and wrote. Mary Barton (1848) was her first success.

Two years later she began writing for Dickens's magazine, Household Words, to which she contributed fiction for the next thirteen years, notably a further industrial novel, North and South (1855). In 1850 she met and secured the friendship of Charlotte Brontë. After Charlotte's death in March 1855, Patrick Brontë chose his daughter's friend and fellow-novelist to write The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), a probing and sympathetic account, that has attained classic stature.

Elizabeth Gaskell's position as a clergyman's wife and as a successful writer introduced her to a wide circle of friends, both from the professional world of Manchester and from the larger literary world. Her output was substantial and completely professional. Dickens discovered her resilient strength of character when trying to impose his views on her as editor of Household Words. She proved that she was not to be bullied, even by such a strong-willed man.

Her later works, Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Cousin Phillis (1864) and Wives and Daughters (1866) reveal that she was continuing to develop her writing in new literary directions. Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly in November 1865.

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