Classics for Your Collection:
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Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, George Moore, Walter Besant and Henry James are the contributors in this collection of short Victorian stories.
-The Manchester Marriage- (Elizabeth Gaskell) - Probably the most romantic of the tales, and the most sentimental as well as the most predictable.
-A Mere Interlude- (Thomas Hardy) - Thomas Hardy always seems to have a knack for creating stunningly flawed characters, and the female lead, Baptista, is no exception. Her flaw is that...

Elizabeth Gaskell By Elizabeth Gaskell Edited by Lacey Belinda Smith

Mary Barton is the first novel by English author Elizabeth Gaskell, published in 1848. The story is set in the English city of Manchester between 1839 and 1842, and deals with the difficulties faced by the Victorian working class. It is subtitled "A Tale of Manchester Life." The novel begins in Manchester, where we are introduced to the Bartons and the Wilsons, two working-class families. John Barton is a questioner of the distribution of wealth and the relations between rich and poor. Soon his wife dies-he blames it on her grief over the disappearance of her sister Esther. Having already...

Cranford is one of the better-known novels of the 19th-century English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. It was first published, irregularly, in eight instalments, between December 1851 and May 1853, in the magazine Household Words, which was edited by Charles Dickens. It was then published, with minor revision, in book form in 1853.The first instalment (in Household Words), which became the novel's first two chapters, was originally published "as a self-contained sketch,"and the "irregular way" the further seven instalments were published suggests that it took Mrs Gaskell time to think of making...

North and South is a social novel by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. Along with Wives and Daughters (1865) and Cranford (1853), it is one of her best known novels and has been adapted for television twice, in 1975 and 2004. The latter version renewed interest in the novel and gained it a wider readership. While Gaskell's first novel Mary Barton (1848) focused on relations between employers and workers in Manchester from the perspective of the working poor, North and South uses a protagonist from southern England to present and comment on the perspectives of both mill owners and mill workers...