Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (born September 29, 1810, Chelsea, London, England; died November 12, 1865, near Alton, Hampshire) was an English novelist, short-story writer, and Charlotte Brontë’s first biographer.

Daughter of a Unitarian minister. After her mother died, she was raised by a maternal aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire, in an old-fashioned rural gentility. She married Unitarian pastor William Gaskell in 1832 and moved to Manchester, an overcrowded industrial city, where she lived for the remainder of her life. The Gaskells had six children, four of whom became adults, and the social and charitable duties of a minister’s wife took up her time but not her mind. After her only son died, she felt a greater feeling of solidarity with the poor and wanted to “give utterance” to their “agony.” She began writing in middle age. Mary Barton, her debut novel, captures late 1830s Manchester style. The father, John Barton, becomes bitterly class-hateful during a cycle depression and commits a retaliatory murder at his trade union’s request. Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle praised the story for its timely publication in 1848, the revolutionary year. Dickens got her to write Cranford (1853) for Household Words, his magazine. This social history of a gentler era, which chronicles her childhood village of Knutsford and its shabby-genteel residents’ struggles to maintain appearances, is her most popular work.

In 1853, Mrs. Gaskell’s next social novel, Ruth, was met with mixed reviews due to her empathetic understanding and Victorian morals. It offered an alternative to the seduced girl’s prostitution and early death.