‘We who never saw her, with her manner ‘gay but definite’, her beautiful face, and her ‘almost perfect arm’ find something of the same delight in her books. What a pleasure it is to read them!”

So wrote Virginia Woolf of Elizabeth Gaskell, whose bicentenary falls this year. She was born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson in Chelsea on 29 September 1810 in what is now Cheyne Walk. Within 13 months, her mother was dead. Her father showed little interest in Elizabeth, either then or later, and so she was sent to live with her mother’s sister, her ‘more than mother’ Aunt Lumb in Knutsford. Forty years later, the sleepy Cheshire town, the abode of “eleven widows of respectability” and “spinsters innumerable” would become Cranford, a feminine society without those men who, says Miss Deborah, are so “in the way in a house”.

Elizabeth grew up loved and secure, among a vast extended family of Holland aunts, uncles and cousins. Her father soon remarried and, like Molly Gibson in Wives and Daughters, her relationship with her socialclimbing stepmother was one of mutual dislike. Occasionally, Elizabeth returned to London, but she was always very unhappy there.

Only her sailor brother John, whom she adored, cared for her at all. Sadly, when she was 12, he decided, like Miss Matty’s brother in Cranford, to leave England for good.

Restless, unhappy and with no money, he set sail for India and was never heard from again.

Unsurprisingly, the orphan, the lost mother, the lost brother, the neglectful father and the unloving stepmother appear again and again in Elizabeth’s fiction.

Elizabeth married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister like her father. He was tall and handsome, a rock-like contrast to his wife’s energy, and a workaholic. At home at 42 Plymouth Grove – now in the run-down outskirts of Manchester but then looking out on to fi elds – she made a family of her own, bringing up four daughters with fi rmness and love.

Her anxiety to be a good mother is shown in the touching diary she kept during her eldest daughter’s fi rst year of life. “Crying has been a great diffi culty with me. Books do so differ.” Her first daughter was stillborn and in a rare poem she revisits that sadness:

4 July 1836

Of the death of her tiny son, Willie, from scarlet fever, she never spoke.

She wrote most often in the dining room at Plymouth Grove, “scuttering my pencil away when anyone comes near”.  e room had three doors, which meant constant interruptions from children, servants and the endless succession of friends who came to call and to stay. William’s study door, by contrast, remained fi rmly shut against domestic interruption.

Love of gardening 

Though fated to live in a city, she never lost her passion for the country. She wrote that each spring “I feel a stirring instinct and long to be off into the deep grassy solitudes of the country… but I have ties at home and duties to perform.” Instead, she turned to gardening: “We have got peas, cabbages… pinks, carnations, campion, Canterbury bells…” She loved her greenhouse and grew her roses in it.

She took an adjoining fi eld where, like Miss Betty in Cranford, she set up her cow – “half Alderney, quarter Ayrshire and quarter Holderness” – though without the dark grey fl annel! She kept a pig for bacon and was inordinately proud of her poultry.

She was famous for training her maids, gave classes to working girls and, as a minister’s wife, was at the centre of the exhausting relief work necessitated by the epidemics, cotton crashes and political struggles of industrial Manchester.

Plymouth Grove sparkled with the glitterati of the day. She was a fully paid-up member of the Victorian chattering classes, the intellectual families of Huxleys, Hollands, Wedgwoods, Arnolds, Nightingales and Darwins. She knew everyone, wrote to everyone – hundreds of her letters still exist – and went everywhere. She badgered Lady Kay Shuttleworth plain; the rather writers became friends, with Elizabeth acting the mother to Charlotte’s orphan. She travelled widely at home and abroad, searching William was unperturbed by these increasingly frequent escapes and took his own infrequent walking holidays alone.

Ghost stories

She was a famous storyteller, terrifying her schoolmates with her ghost stories and holding horror story sessions at Plymouth Grove. A friend remembers listening to Elizabeth’s “beautiful voice, harmoniously fl owing on and on… as we all sat indoors one gusty morning listening to her ghost stories”. Dickens called her his “dear Scheherazade – for I am sure your powers of narrative can never be exhausted in a single night, but must be good for at least a thousand nights and one”.

She began to write in her 30s, initially driven by little Willie’s death. Once launched with Mary Barton (1848), set in cotton-rich Manchester where families lived 12 to a cellar and ‘intended to bring masters and men’ together, there was no stopping her.  The novel earned her Dickens’ admiration and he published her stories from Cranford and other short stories – often supernatural in theme – in his hugely popular magazine Household Words.

Another ‘social’ novel, Ruth, followed in 1853, a brave attempt to tackle Victorian attitudes to unmarried mothers. North and South and Sylvia’s Lovers continued her popularity, but her last novel, Wives and Daughters, published after her death in 1865, is surely her masterpiece. It is set again in the Knutsford of her childhood, with its great stately homes like Tatton Park and Tabley House nearby. Tatton Park becomes Cumnor Towers in the book, where little Molly Gibson falls asleep under the cedar tree.

Since 1860, Elizabeth had found her thoughts and stories returning increasingly to her country upbringing. Without William’s knowledge, she had secretly bought a house in Holybourne, a village in Hampshire, for herself and William to retire to.

On Sunday 12 November 1865, the family – without William – met for tea in the newly furnished drawing room. While she was speaking of a friend’s visit to Rome, Elizabeth suddenly fell forward into her daughter’s arms. She was dead, perhaps exhausted, at the early age of 55.

Her beauty and great personal charm were famous. The depressions and headaches, the longing for the absent mother, and the grief for her son and stillborn first daughter never left her, yet she was renowned for her enormous vitality.

Thackeray’s eldest daughter, Anne Ritchie, has left a vivid picture of her “delicate enunciation, singularly clear and cultivated… moved by a laugh now and then, and restrained by a certain shyness which belongs to sensitive people who feel what others are feeling almost too quickly… She was a singularly happy person.”

Her letters show a love of gossip – “I want to know all about it” – a keen sense of humour and great practicality. She clearly had the gift of living in the present moment, concentrating absolutely on whatever or whoever was there in front of her.

A complex character, she also had a quick temper, expensive tastes and a love of comfort, all of which she felt guilty about, and underneath the charm, a will of iron. Her stormy relationship with Dickens over deadlines made him exclaim to his sub-editor: “Oh! Mrs Gaskell-fearful-fearful! If I were Mr G oh heavens how I would beat her!”

As Eliza Doolittle would say, not bloody likely!

Jackie Wilkin is a freelance literature lecturer, speaker and writer. She writes the Book Page for WI Life, speaks to WI branches and works with WI Book Groups up and down the country to help them choose and discuss books. Her next Denman College courses are Cranford and Wives and Daughters (1–4 March 2010) and Wartime Memories (21–24 June 2010).