Features one of the most original and fully-rounded female characters in Victorian fiction, Margaret Hale. This title shows how, forced to move from the country to an industrial northern town, she develops a passionate sense of social justice, and a turbulent relationship with mill-owner John Thornton.

Set in a provincial town in the early 19th century, 'Wives and Daughters', Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel, is a subtle representation of historical change explored in human terms.

Elizabeth Gaskell has long been one of the most popular of Victorian novelists, yet in her lifetime her shorter fictions were equally well loved, and they are among the most accomplished examples of the genre. The heart of this collection is Gaskell's novella Cousin Phillis, a lyrical masterpiece that depicts a vanishing way of life and a girl's disappointment in love: deceptively simple, its undercurrent of feeling leaves an indelible impression. The other five stories in this selection range from a quietly original tale of urban poverty and a fallen woman to an historical tale in which...

Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel, is regarded by many as her masterpiece. Molly Gibson is the daughter of the doctor in the small provincial town of Hollingford. Her widowed father marries a second time to give Molly the woman's presence he feels she lacks, but until the arrival of Cynthia, her dazzling step-sister, Molly finds her situation hard to accept. Intertwined with the story of the Gibsons is that of Squire Hamley and his two sons; as Molly grows up and falls in love she learns to judge people for what they are, not what they seem. Through Molly's observations the...

Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) is a pioneering biography of one great Victorian woman novelist by another. Gaskell was a friend of Bronte's and, having been invited to write the official life, determined to both tell the truth and honor her friend. This edition collates all three previous editions, as well as the manuscript, offering fuller information about the process of writing and a more detailed explanation of the text than any previous edition.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature...

A vivid and affectionate portrait of a provincial town in early Victorian England, Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford describes a community dominated by its independent and refined women. This edition includes two related short pieces by Gaskell, "The Last Generation in England" and "The Cage at Cranford." Dinah Birch's introduction reflects recent revaluations of Gaskell's work and the growing recognition that Cranford is much more than the gently charming comedy that is was once taken to be. The book includes an up-to-date bibliography and expanded notes.

Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth (1853) was the first mainstream novel to make a fallen woman its eponymous heroine. It is a remarkable story of love, of the sanctuary and tyranny of the family, and of the consequences of lies and deception, one that lays bare Victorian hypocrisy and sexual double-standards. Shocking to contemporary readers, its radical utopian vision of "a pure woman faithfully presented" predates Hardy's Tess by nearly forty years. This fully revised and corrected new edition is based on the three-volume first edition of 1853, collated with the one-volume 1855 edition. Tim Dolin's...

'He's spoilt my life, - he's spoilt it for as long as iver I live on this earth'
The compelling story of an ordinary girl's tragic passion for a man who disappears, Sylvia's Lovers (1863) is Elizabeth Gaskell's last completed novel. Set in a fictional Whitby at the end of the eighteenth century, the novel is a modern revenge tragedy in which well-intentioned actions have unforeseen and terrible human consequences. Sylvia is loved by two men, her serious cousin Philip and the charismatic sailor Charley Kinraid. When one of them betrays her, her path in life seems fixed. Against the...

This Norton Critical Edition of her best-selling novel is annotated and edited by preeminent Gaskell scholar Alan Shelston. "Contexts" includes contemporary reviews and correspondence related to North and South, along with the full text of Gaskell s 1850 short story "Lizzie Leigh," which, like North and South, is set in industrial Manchester and deals with strong working women. This topic is further addressed in Bessie Rayner Parkes s essay on Victorian working women. "Criticism" collects eleven assessments of the novel, among them Louis Cazamian s 1904 study of industrial fiction and Hilary...