Many-windowed factory
The Hale family’s first sight of their new home is grim and constrained, comprising small, brick houses dotted among ‘many-windowed...
Like sunlight on a landscape
You can see an overcast English landscape of rolling hills and fields, and a sudden break in the clouds pierced...
Fresh-gathered roses
This is a bright spot in a serious story, a guest room scented by roses crushed into water to release...
An original thought
Gibson is one of the main characters in Wives and Daughters, the wry village doctor, and father of Molly, one...
Grating tones and scraping slates
The early 19th century equivalent of scratching chalk down a blackboard, setting your teeth on edge. Molly is one of...
Letters tolerably long
Gaskell has many Jane Austen touches in cheerily summing up lightweight characters. But inconsequent as the letter and the writer...
Tender-coloured sky
Elizabeth Gaskell was a Victorian novelist and a friend of Charlotte Bronte, whose biography she wrote. I see her as...
The innovation of envelopes
They’re so ubiquitous that it’s a surprise to learn envelopes were a mid-nineteenth century invention. Somewhere in Gaskell I remember...
Mind as mirror
Mrs Kirkpatrick, step-mother to the heroine Molly, is a wonderful character in one of Elizabeth Gaskell’s finest novels. Published in...
Letters kept, letters destroyed
Given the fragility of letters, it’s astounding how many have survived centuries and even millennia. Added to which it seems...
Roll your own, but don’t swallow them
Dr Gibson, the wry Scottish hero of this best of Gaskell novels, suffers a series of underwhelming apprentices, often to...
Stone-coped house
This is the first visit Margaret makes to a contact given the Hale family by a friend of her father’s....
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