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  • Published: 15 July 1994
  • ISBN: 9781857151855
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 424
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

Mary Barton

A Tale of Manchester Life




Penguin Classics relaunch

Published in 1848, MARY BARTON was the first novel of Elizabeth Gaskell, later to become celebrated as the author of CRANFORD, MARY BARTON - a better book than CRANFORD - was written after she has married a Manchester clergyman, and it conbines a typically sturdy romantic plot with striking descriptions of working people and their lives as she had encountered them in northern mills. Despite this grim setting, the book has all this author's well-known charm and considerable power to involve the reader in the lives of her characters. More accessible than George Eliot, less frenzied than Charlotte Bronte, Mrs Gaskell is a novelist whose wit, human warmth and sharp eye for detail bring ordinary experience to vivid life.

  • Published: 15 July 1994
  • ISBN: 9781857151855
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 424
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

Other books in the series

Russian Thinkers
The New Penguin Book Of American Short Stories, From Washington Irving To Lydia Davis
When You Are Old
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
The Good Soldier
Selected Poetry
Venus in Furs
Man and Superman
Military Dispatches
The Prelude

About the author

Elizabeth Gaskell

ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810–1865) was born Elizabeth Stevenson in London, the daughter of a Unitarian minister who resigned his position on conscientious grounds. Her mother died a year after her birth, and Gaskell spent her formative years in the care of relatives in northern England. In 1832, she married William Gaskell, a well-known Unitarian minister, and joined him to work among the poor for social reform. They had four daughters, as well as a son who died in infancy. His death left Gaskell so distraught that she began writing for distraction. Her first major success was the novel Mary Barton (1848)—published, as were her first several works of short fiction, under the pseudonym Cotton Mather Mills. For many years, she also wrote regularly for Charles Dickens’s magazine, Household Words, contributing stories and a serialized novel, Cranford. Meanwhile, the Gaskells’ home in Manchester became a popular stop for writers and reformers, including Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Ruskin, and Charlotte Brontë, who became a close friend. After Brontë’s death, her father, Patrick Brontë, asked Gaskell to write her biography. The Life of Charlotte Brontë proved a pioneering and controversial psychological study of Brontë’s family life, and remains perhaps the most important book on the writer. Gaskell died of a heart attack in 1865. A memorial to her lies at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

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