In this beautifully written study, Carolyn Lambert explores the ways in which Elizabeth Gaskell challenges the nineteenth-century cultural construct of the home as a domestic sanctuary offering protection from the stresses and strains of the external world. Gaskell's fictional homes often fail to provide a place of safety: doors and windows are ambiguous openings through which death can enter, and are potent signifiers of entrapment as well as protective barriers. The underlying fragility of Gaskell's concept of home is illustrated by her narratives of homelessness, a state she uses to...