Elizabeth Gaskell

When critics seek a defining term to describe Elizabeth Gaskell, charm seems the indispensable word. It carries praise with just that degree of condescension most often found in critical discourse. To be charming, after all, means to be pleasing, with the reservation that the pleasure is essentially indefinable and therefore inconsequential. When Gaskell is commended, and the critical tide is now turning in her favor, it is generally in language that could be used as a reference for a good domestic - honest, sanguine, and industrious. There have been few attempts to explore her narrative skills and aesthetic principles, to find the relationship between the novels and one of the most convincing biographies ever written. The tendentious could well argue that if Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskell created Charlotte Bronte. Certainly Charlotte Bronte as the subject of fiction and popular opinion owes more to Gaskell than to any critical comment.