Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65) was a highly successful and popular Victorian novelist. Her books are still read and studied more than 150 years after her death, and during the great costume drama boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s three of her best-known works — Cranford (1851–53), North and South (1854–55) and Wives and Daughters (1864–66) — received the full prestige BBC television adaptation treatment. Yet Robert McCrum argues that Gaskell’s 1857 biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë may be her finest work — ‘a bold portrait of a brilliant woman worn down by her father’s eccentricities and the death of her siblings’ (McCrum 2017). This pioneering and controversial biographical study — a true landmark in criticism — offers a fascinating insight into the life and mind of one of the greatest novelists in the English language, from the unique perspective of another professional woman writer.
The two writers met in 1850 and stayed friends until Charlotte Brontë’s death in 1855. Gaskell was a clergyman’s wife and Brontë a clergyman’s daughter; both lived in the North, rather than in London, which then (as now) dominated the intellectual scene. Yet in other ways, as McCrum points out, they were ‘polar opposites’:
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