Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) was an English novelist, born in Chelsea and raised by an aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire, the small town she later drew as Cranford. She married a Unitarian minister in Manchester, and the industrial city gave her the material for Mary Barton (1848), her first novel, and North and South, both of which took the condition of the working poor seriously enough to alarm reviewers. She was a friend of Charlotte Brontë and wrote the first biography of her, and a contributor of Dickens, who published Cranford in Household Words. Wives and Daughters, her finest novel, was a few chapters from completion when she died suddenly at tea.