This Month in Writing – September

How would you then define a hero? ‘The Sexton’s Hero’, was published in William and Mary Howitt’s Journal during September 1847, the year before Gaskell ‘s first, and much-loved, novel […]

Cairo Street Unitarian Chapel, Warrington

In 1845 while scarlet fever was rife in Manchester, Elizabeth Gaskell took her young family, comprising then of three girls and a baby boy, William, out to North Wales to […]

Women in Science

The Gaskell Society recently received a question via Twitter concerning connections between Molly Gibson (Wives and Daughters) and Eleanor Omerod, an entomologist. Omerod was born in Gloucestershire in 1828, moving […]

Confessions of a Nervous Chair….

It’s hard to imagine a more nerve-wracking scenario than Newish Chairwoman organising and chairing her first conference for such a well-respected literary society as the Gaskell Society. NOT helped by […]

This Month in Writing: ‘An Accursed Race’

We all think of Elizabeth Gaskell as a brilliantly entertaining storyteller, whom Dickens addressed as ‘my dear Scheherazade’. But how many of us know her works of non-fiction?  One interesting […]

The Gaskell Revival

Elizabeth Gaskell, the wife of a Unitarian minister of religion in Manchester, shared her husband’s interest in literature: they published some jointly written verses in 1837.  Elizabeth became a best-selling […]

A celebration – and a secret!

On 31st May 2019, the Gaskell Society held a joint celebration at Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in Manchester.  Members of the Gaskell Society committee joined with past and present editors of the Gaskell […]

Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey

In 2010, on the bicentenary of her birth, Elizabeth Gaskell was finally given the recognition she deserves, as a window panel in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, was dedicated to her […]

The Elizabeth Gaskell Train

From the Northern Rail website A train, named after Elizabeth Gaskell, was unveiled at Manchester’s Piccadilly Station on 28 February 2014. A ceremony, organised in conjunction with Mid-Cheshire Community Rail Partnership, saw Northern’s […]