Volume 41, Number 6 · March 24, 1994
The Discreet Charms of Mrs. G.
By Robert Bernard Martin
Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories
by Jenny Uglow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 690 pp., $35.00
Allan Massie, himself a notable British novelist, very much of this century, recently asked, 'How many nineteenth-century British novelists are still read? You would be stretching things to put the figure as high as twenty.' By my own count, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810–1865) could probably scrape into the magic score by a nose, but she would be lucky to do better than the high teens. In some ways a pity, for she occupies an honorable place in literary history. Any account of her accomplishments would have to mention that she was one of the first English 'social novelists,' taking her early subject matter in part from that remarkable peoples' movement, the Chartists, and from the industrial unrest in the middle of the century.
Review, 4159 words
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