Elizabeth Gaskell

Written at the request of Charles Dickens, North and South is a book about rebellion that poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience....

Molly Gibson, the only daughter of a widowed doctor in the small provincial town of Hollingford, lost her mother when she was a child....

Ruth, an orphaned heroine, is seduced and then abandoned by wealthy Henry Bellingham....

A vivid and affectionate portrait of the residents of an English country town in the mid-19th century, Cranford describes a community dominated by its independent and refined women....

Set in English society before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters centers on the story of youthful Molly Gibson, brought up from childhood by her father....

When her father assassinates Henry Carson, his employer's son and Mary's admirer, suspicion falls on Mary's second admirer, Jem, a fellow worker....

Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell's best-known work, is a humorous account of a nineteenth-century English village dominated by a group of genteel but modestly circumstanced women....

When her father leaves the Church, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the North of England....

Life in an English seaside town in the 1790s is harsh, and ‘captious, capricious’ Sylvia has a dilemma when the dashing harpooner to whom she is secretly engaged disappears, and her dull cousin Philip (who has more information about his rival than he lets on) offers her love and security.

Lady Ludlow's appalling snobbery, prejudice and bred-in-the-bone conviction as to the superiority of the English aristocracy and their feudal way of life are deliciously tested....

This charming piece of social observation throws a gentle spotlight on life in a small village in northern England of the 1850s....

Set in English society before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters centres on the story of youthful Molly Gibson, brought up from childhood by her father....

When Margaret Hale is forced to leave her home in the tranquil rural South of England for the industrial Northern town of Milton, she finds herself in a very different country run by men, like mill owner John Thornton, with very different beliefs to her own....

Almost always when we think of Ghost Stories, we first think of those written by the Victorians.

Cousin Phillis – a miniature masterpiece – is set in the 1840s, when the coming of the railway was changing the face of England....

Elizabeth Gaskell was one of Victorian England's pre-eminent female novelists. This comprehensive collection comprises dramas and readings of her finest works and some lesser-known pieces....

Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë—the first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist—is a true classic. It transports us with a deft hand straight into 19th-century Haworth, Yorkshire and crafts an extensive account of Brontë’s life.

When Margaret Hale moves with her father from the comfort of the south of England to the industrial north, she is at first repulsed by what she sees....

Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel, is regarded by many as her masterpiece....

The Ultimate Classics Collection: Volume Five is the fifth instalment of our wide-ranging classic collections.