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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Mrs Gaskell
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(Elizabeth Stevenson, 1810–65, m. William Gaskell 1832) Novelist of everyday life, especially in the northwest. Her mother died when she was one month old and she was brought up by a maternal aunt at Knutsford, in Cheshire, the setting for her best-known novel, *Cranford. Her husband was a Unitarian minister in Manchester, where she saw at close quarters the poverty and misery of the *hungry forties, the decade in which *Engels was noting the condition of the working classes in this same great industrial city.
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This was the raw material of her first novel, Mary Barton: a Tale of Manchester Life (1848), in which the heroine is the daughter of a trade unionist. Coming out in Europe's year of revolutions, the book was greeted with fury by Manchester mill-owners but won her the immediate respect of other writers. Another new novelist of great distinction, first published in the previous year, was Charlotte *Brontë. Mrs Gaskell became her firm friend and, in 1857, her first biographer.
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