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Elizabeth Stevenson was born in Chelsea, London, in 1810. Her mother, worn out by giving birth to eight children, of whom only two survived, died thirteen months later. Elizabeth's father, William Stevenson, was a Unitarian but had given up preaching to become the Keeper of the Treasury Records. Unable to raise her himself, Stevenson sent Elizabeth to live with her aunt Hannah Lamb, who lived in Knutsford, Cheshire.

Elizabeth shared her father's religious beliefs and attended the local Unitarian chapel and taught at Sunday School. At the age of eighteen, Elizabeth's brother, John Stevenson was drowned at sea. The news devastated her father and he went into a deep depression. Elizabeth now returned to her father's household in London where she nursed him until his death in 1829.

A distant relative, William Turner, a Unitarian minister in Newcastle, invited Elizabeth to live with his family. Elizabeth's was deeply influenced by Turner's religious beliefs and charitable works. On a visit to Turner's daughter, who lived in Manchester, Elizabeth met William Gaskell, a minister at their local Unitarian chapel. They quickly developed a close friendship and were married on 30th August, 1832.

Most of William Gaskell's parishioners were textile workers and Elizabeth was deeply shocked by the poverty she witnessed in Manchester. Elizabeth, like her husband, became involved in various charity work in the city. She also started writing a novel that attempted to illustrate the problems faced by people living in industrial towns and cities.

Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life was published in 1848. With its casts of working-class characters and its attempt to address key social issues such as urban poverty, Chartism and the emerging trade union movement, Gaskell's novel shocked Victorian society. It also was greatly admired by other writers such as Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Carlyle.

Dickens was so impressed that he arranged for Gaskell's next novel, Cranford, to be serialised in his journal, Household Words (1851-1853). Jenny Uglow has suggested in her book, Mrs Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (1993) that the Cranford stories "make the dangerous safe, touching the tenderest spots of memory and bringing the single, the odd and the wanderer into the circle of family and community."

Other novels written by Gaskell include Ruth (1853), North and South (1855), and Sylvia's Lovers (1863). In her books Gaskell expressed a deep sympathy for the poor and suggested the need for large-scale social reform. Gaskell also wrote an acclaimed biography of Charlotte Bronte. This also created controversy and some allegedly libellous statements had to be removed before The Life of Charlotte Bronte could be published.

Claire Tomalin has argued: "What we learn from the story is that Elizabeth Gaskell was a far stranger person than the usual picture of her allows. A strange, strong person - the superwoman of Victorian literature, perhaps? For she was lovely, charming, clever, expansive, brave, without vices or even neuroses; and formidable. With no more education than any other nice girl born in 1810; with marriage at twenty-one, and seven pregnancies thereafter; with all the domestic and social duties of the wife of a Unitarian minister, and the care and upbringing of her children; not to mention a taste for travel - prison visiting and humanitarian work among the poor - a social life as exuberant as that of Dickens and a circle of friends as large - with all this, still, at the age of thirty-six she became an enormously successful and respected writer in a hugely competitive and brilliant field."

Elizabeth Gaskell died in 1865.

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(1) Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848)

We proceeded home, through many half-finished streets, all so like one another, that you might have easily been bewildered and lost your way. Not a step, however, did our friends lose; down the entry, cutting off that corner, until they turned out of one of these innumerable streets into a little paved court, having the backs of houses at the end opposite to the opening, and a gutter running through the middle to carry off household slops, washing suds, etc. The women who lived in the court were busy taking in strings of caps, frocks, and various articles of linen, which hung from side to side, dangling so low, that if our friends had been a few minutes sooner, they would have had to stoop very much, or else the half-wet clothes would have flapped in their faces: but although the evening seemed yet early when they were in the open fields - among the pent-up houses, night, with its mists and its darkness, had already begun to fall.

(2) Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848)

Carson's mill ran lengthways from east to west. Along it went one of the oldest thoroughfares in Manchester. Indeed, all that part of the town was comparatively old; it was there that the first cotton mills were built, and the crowded alleys and back streets of the neighbourhood made a fire there particularly to be dreaded. The staircase of the mill ascended from the entrance at the western end, which faced into a wide, dingy-looking street, consisting principally of public houses, pawnbrokers' shops, rag and bone warehouses, and dirty provision shops. The other, the east end of the factory, fronted into a very narrow back street, not twenty feet wide, and miserably lighted and paved. Right against the end of the factory were the gable ends of the last house in the principal street - a house which from its size, its handsome stone facings, and the attempt at ornament in the front, had probably been once a gentleman's house; but now the light which streamed from its enlarged front window made clear the interior of the splendidly fitted up room, with its painted walls, its pillared recesses, its gilded and gorgeous fittings-up, its miserable squalid inmates. It was a gin palace.

(3) Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848)

Berry Street was unpaved; and down the middle a gutter forced its way, every now and then forming pools in the holes with which the street abounded. Never was the old Edinburgh cry of "Gardez l'eau!' more necessary than in the street. As they passed, women from their doors tossed household slops of every description into the gutter; they ran into the next pool, which over-flowed and stagnated.

You went down one step from this foul area into the cellar in which a family of human beings lived. It was very dark inside. The window-panes many of them were broken and stuffed with rags, which was reason enough for the dusky light that pervaded the place at mid-day. After the account I have given of the state of the street, no one can be surprised that on going into the cellar inhabited by Davenport, the smell was so foetid as almost to knock the two men down. Quickly recovering themselves, as those inured to such things do, they began to penetrate the thick darkness of the place, and to see three or four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up; the fireplace was empty and black; the wife sat on the husband's lair, and cried in the dark loneliness.

(4) Claire Tomalin , Independent on Sunday (1992)

What we learn from the story is that Elizabeth Gaskell was a far stranger person than the usual picture of her allows. A strange, strong person - the superwoman of Victorian literature, perhaps? For she was lovely, charming, clever, expansive, brave, without vices or even neuroses; and formidable. With no more education than any other nice girl born in 1810; with marriage at twenty-one, and seven pregnancies thereafter; with all the domestic and social duties of the wife of a Unitarian minister, and the care and upbringing of her children; not to mention a taste for travel - prison visiting and humanitarian work among the poor - a social life as exuberant as that of Dickens and a circle of friends as large - with all this, still, at the age of thirty-six she became an enormously successful and respected writer in a hugely competitive and brilliant field.

Compare her with other great women writers of her generation, all of whom felt absolutely obliged to protect themselves from the normal world in order to get any writing done. George Eliot (childless) refused even to keep a spare room for friends, knowing what it would do to her working schedule. Elizabeth Barrett (one late child) made herself into an invalid to get time and privacy in which to write. Christina Rossetti (childless) turned determinedly away from the pleasures of earthly life. The Bronte sisters (all childless, though Charlotte died pregnant) defended their isolation with ferocity, at the cost of any semblance of conventional womanly happiness.

But Mrs Gaskell would dance half the night; she had a hearty appetite; she played cards, went to the theatre, cared about fashion and gossip, adored her children, enchanted almost everyone who met her and was forever entertaining and being entertained. Annie Thackeray described her conversational manner as "gay yet definite", a description that suits many aspects of her behaviour perfectly. Even when her husband, with his degree from Glasgow and his classical scholarship, put her down for "slip-shod" letter-writing, she remained a cheerful correspondent to his sister; and when she was quite tired out from all the demands made on her, the letter-writing pen only dashed the faster. Dickens, who admired her work, but did not expect women to fight him, was driven to exclaim, in the course of an editorial battle with her, "if I were Mr G. O Heaven how I would beat her".

Mrs Gaskell was unbeatable. Her range and achievement as a writer of biography, novels and stories over the mere twenty years she had at her disposal are staggering. How was it done? She was certainly not the meek, dovelike creature some earlier biographers have drawn; equally, she was not the full-blown Marxist and feminist others have divined beneath the Cranford cap...

As a daughter, her life was sad, her mother dying when she was just one year old; but she was taken in by a middle-aged aunt who lived, separated from an insane husband and with a crippled daughter, in the little Cheshire town of Knutsford. So her consciousness was formed among strong, odd women, and apart from her only brother. Knutsford was to become Cranford four decades later, its female society reconstituted in gently humorous prose. Jennifer Uglow suggests that the Cranford stories "make the dangerous safe, touching the tenderest spots of memory and bringing the single, the odd and the wanderer into the circle of family and community", which is perceptive both about the book and about its origins in the life of an orphan.

Growing up, Elizabeth was not unhappy; but she saw little of either brother or father and, when she did, found she had acquired an uncongenial stepmother. The sore and empty places left in the heart and the imagination by such experiences - lost parents and siblings, false geniality - must be thought of when you ask what makes someone become a writer. Add to them the disappearance of her brother at sea when she was eighteen, immediately followed by the death of their father; small wonder if the imagination had the edge on the real world. Yet she was cheerful, popular, serene, apparently pleased enough to keep moving from one set of friends and relations to another...

Unlike Dickens, she made her marriage work. To be fair to Mr Gaskell, it was he who encouraged her to start writing seriously, in the aftermath of the death of their small son. And although she did mention his inability to express affection, you can't help wondering whether a certain emotional emptiness, first in childhood, then in marriage, may not have helped to form and keep her a writer. Too much intimacy, too much `happiness', can be a problem, a distraction from the world of the imagination, a spoke in the mechanism that manufactures fiction. Had she lived, had she led Mr Gaskell triumphantly to the intimacy of the Hampshire dream house, would she have gone on writing so well? We can't tell.