Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810–1865) was an English novelist. Raised by an aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire, the model for her Cranford, she married the Unitarian minister William Gaskell and lived in Manchester, where she saw the poverty of the industrial city at close hand. Her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), drew the attention of Charles Dickens, who published her in Household Words. Cranford, Ruth, North and South and Sylvia's Lovers followed, along with her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), a friend whose biography she wrote at the family's request. She died suddenly before finishing her last novel, Wives and Daughters.