Why Elizabeth Gaskell?

I was always drawn to Elizabeth Gaskell as a writer who lived in Manchester and who wrote about its social issues and conditions. She was born in London in 1810, the daughter of a Unitarian minister. Her mother died when she was a year old and her mother’s oldest sister brought her up in Knutsford. Aged 21 she married another Unitarian Minister, William Gaskell and they had four surviving children. Throughout her married life she lived in Manchester and worked alongside her husband to relieve the poverty and horrendous conditions in the slums, and to educate the poor, as well as bringing up her daughters, keeping up a prodigious correspondence with friends, relatives and some of the most famous people of her day and entertaining a continuous stream of guests in her home. All this while pursuing her writing career! Just reading about her life is exhausting!

It always interested me that out of the female Victorian writers still read today, Elizabeth Gaskell is one of the very few who was married with children and what amounted to an alternative career in social work and education. Among those novelists she wrote, in my humble opinion, the best political novels about poverty and class. I’m a big fan of Jane Eyre but not of Shirley for instance. Middlemarch is one of my favourite novels but I find Felix Holt the Radical virtually unreadable.

Almost all my fiction is concerned with class divisions in society, and almost all of it is set in Manchester. Because Elizabeth Gaskell involved herself with the Mancunian poor and working class she was the perfect person to portray in this setting. The story of Elizabeth and Pasley presented an opportunity to write something I’ve wanted to write for a long time, about the relationship between two women of different classes. Is it exploitative, patronising, fostering dependency, or all of those things and something more complex? That’s what I wanted to explore.