Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell has been presented in many different terms: as a timid, conventional Victorian woman and as a feminist critic of her society, as a chartist sympathizer and as an apologist for class privilege. This new study of Gaskell's major work argues that, as a Unitarian and as a middle-class woman, she held a number of warring allegiances that show themselves in complexities and contradictions in her writing, but that, towards the end of her career, she found ways of resolving for herself the tensions beween social duty and artistic delight. A feminist perspective is given on her novels and biography. By the author of "The Rise of the Woman Novelist from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen".