Complete Romance of Elizabeth Gaskell

Contents

Wives and Daughters: An Everyday Story (Illustrated)

Sylvia's Lovers (Complete)

North and South

Mary Barton

Cranford

Ruth

The Grey Woman and other Tales

Curious, if True

The Half-Brothers

Cousin Phillis

My Lady Ludlow

The Moorland Cottage

Lizzie Leigh

An Accursed Race

The Doom of the Griffiths

Half a Life-Time Ago

A Dark Night's Work

Round the Sofa

Sylvia's Lovers

The novel begins in the 1790s in the coastal town of Monkshaven against the background of the practice of impressment during the early phases of the Napoleonic Wars. Sylvia Robson lives happily with her parents on a farm, and is passionately loved by her rather dull Quaker cousin Philip. She, however, meets and falls in love with Charlie Kinraid, a dashing sailor on a whaling vessel, and they become secretly engaged. When Kinraid goes back to his ship, he is forcibly enlisted in the Royal Navy by a press gang, a scene witnessed by Philip. Philip does not tell Sylvia of the incident nor relay to her Philip's parting message and, believing her lover is dead…

Cranford

The fictional town of Cranford is closely modelled on Knutsford in Cheshire, which Mrs Gaskell knew well. The book has little in the way of plot and is more a series of episodes in the lives of Mary Smith and her friends, Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, two spinster sisters. The "major" event in the story is the return to Cranford of their long-lost brother, Peter, which in itself is only a minor portion of the work, leaving the rest of the novel at a low-key tone.

Ruth

Ruth is a young orphan girl working in a respectable sweatshop for the overworked Mrs Mason. She is selected to go to a ball to repair torn dresses. At the ball she meets the aristocratic Henry Bellingham, a rake figure who is instantly attracted to her. They meet again by chance and form a secret friendship; on an outing together they are spotted by Mrs Mason who, fearing for her shop's reputation, dismisses Ruth….

Mary Barton

It dealt with relations between employers and workers, but its narrative adopted the view of the working poor and described the "misery and hateful passions caused by the love of pursuing wealth as well as the egoism, thoughtlessness and insensitivity of manufacturers."

The novel begins in Manchester, where we are introduced to the Bartons and the Wilsons, two working-class families. John Barton is a questioner of the distribution of wealth and the relations between rich and poor. Soon his wife dies—he blames it on her grief over the disappearance of her sister Esther. Having already lost his son Tom at a young age, Barton now falls into depression and begins to involve himself in the Chartist, trade-union movement…

In North and South Elizabeth Gaskell returns to the precarious situation of workers and their relations with industrialists, but in a more balanced manner by focusing more on the thinking and perspective of the employers.

Wives and Daughters

The story revolves around Molly Gibson, only daughter of a widowed doctor living in a provincial English town in the 1830s.