Mary Gaskell

He moved to London in 1806 with the intention of going to India after he was appointed private secretary to the Earl of Lauderdale, who was to become Governor General of India.

That position did not materialise, however, and Stevenson was nominated Keeper of the Treasury Records.

His wife, Elizabeth Holland, came from a family established in Lancashire and Cheshire that was connected with other prominent Unitarian families, including the Wedgwoods, the Martineaus, the Turners and the Darwins.

When she died 13 months after giving birth to Gaskell, her husband sent Gaskell to live with her mother's sister, Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, Cheshire.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson; 29 September 1810 – 12 November 1865), often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer.

Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor.

Gaskell was born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson on 29 September 1810 in Lindsey Row, Chelsea, London, now 93 Cheyne Walk.

The doctor who delivered her was Anthony Todd Thomson, and Thomson's sister Catherine later became Gaskell's stepmother.

She was the youngest of eight children; only she and her brother John survived infancy.

Her father, William Stevenson, a Unitarian from Berwick-upon-Tweed, was minister at Failsworth, Lancashire, but resigned his orders on conscientious grounds.

Her father remarried to Catherine Thomson, in 1814.

They had a son, William, in 1815, and a daughter, Catherine, in 1816.

Although Elizabeth spent several years without seeing her father, to whom she was devoted, her older brother John often visited her in Knutsford.

John was destined for the Royal Navy from an early age, like his grandfathers and uncles, but he did not obtain preferment into the Service and had to join the Merchant Navy with the East India Company's fleet.

From 1821 to 1826 she attended a school in Warwickshire run by the Misses Byerley, first at Barford and from 1824 at Avonbank outside Stratford-on-Avon, where she received the traditional education in arts, the classics, decorum and propriety given to young ladies from relatively wealthy families at the time.

Her aunts gave her the classics to read, and she was encouraged by her father in her studies and writing.

Her brother John sent her modern books, and descriptions of his life at sea and his experiences abroad.

After leaving school at the age of 16, Elizabeth travelled to London to spend time with her Holland cousins.

She also spent some time in Newcastle upon Tyne (with the Rev William Turner's family) and from there made the journey to Edinburgh.

John Went missing in 1827 during an expedition to India.

A beautiful young woman, Elizabeth was well-groomed, tidily dressed, kind, gentle, and considerate of others.

Her temperament was calm and collected, joyous and innocent, she revelled in the simplicity of rural life.

Much of Elizabeth's childhood was spent in Cheshire, where she lived with her aunt Hannah Lumb in Knutsford, the town she immortalized as Cranford.

They lived in a large red-brick house called The Heath (now Heathwaite).

Her stepmother's brother was the miniature artist William John Thomson, who in 1832 painted a portrait of Elizabeth Gaskell in Manchester (see top right).

A bust was sculpted by David Dunbar at the same time.

On 30 August 1832 Elizabeth married Unitarian minister William Gaskell, in Knutsford.

They spent their honeymoon in North Wales, staying with her uncle, Samuel Holland, at Plas-yn-Penrhyn near Porthmadog.

The Gaskells then settled in Manchester, where William was the minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel and longest-serving Chair of the Portico Library.

Manchester's industrial surroundings and books borrowed from the library influenced Elizabeth's writing in the industrial genre.

Their first daughter was stillborn in 1833.

Their other children were Marianne (1834), Margaret Emily, known as Meta (1837), Florence Elizabeth (1842), and Julia Bradford (1846).

Marianne and Meta boarded at the private school conducted by Rachel Martineau, sister of Harriet, a close friend of Elizabeth.

In March 1835 Gaskell began a diary documenting the development of her daughter Marianne: she explored parenthood, the values she placed on her role as a mother; her faith, and, later, relations between Marianne and her sister, Meta.

In 1836 she co-authored with her husband a cycle of poems, Sketches among the Poor, which was published in Blackwood's Magazine in January 1837.

Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848.

Among Gaskell's best known novels are Cranford (1851–1853), North and South (1854–1855), and Wives and Daughters (1864–1866), all of which were adapted for television by the BBC.

Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Brontë.

In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë's life; the rest she omitted, deciding certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden.

Florence married Charles Crompton, a barrister and Liberal politician, in 1863.