Literary Links
10-13 July 2026
The Craiglands Hotel, Ilkley, West Yorkshire
We’re delighted to welcome you to Ilkley for our 2026 Conference in which we’ll explore Elizabeth Gaskell’s Literary Links.
Elizabeth Gaskell had a huge network of friends and acquaintances, ranging from wealthy manufacturers and politicians to literary celebrities and publishers. Moreover, her national reputation as a significant voice in Victorian fiction soon became international as her works were published overseas. The links between her writing and the world of politics, literature and culture are vast and are frequently reflected in her writings. We aim to explore some of these links at our 2026 Conference.
Craiglands is a grand Victorian hotel, set in beautifully landscaped grounds in a charming spa town on the edge of Brontë Country. Our programme begins on Friday evening with a presentation by our Chair, Dr Diane Duffy, which will set the scene for our conference. We have a diverse line-up of international speakers this year, with a range of perspectives on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Literary Links. They’ll explore links not only with other writers, but publishers and other disciplines. Full details of the speakers and their presentations are below.
As usual we will be offering evening entertainments, including a quiz and ‘Lilly Links’, a semi-dramatic performance on the Conference theme, during which we’ll hear comments on Gaskell by other authors, together with her lively responses.
There will also be two afternoon excursions. On Saturday we plan to visit the Brotherton Library, the main library of the University of Leeds. After the John Rylands Library in Manchester and Manchester Central Library, the Brotherton is the third most important repository of Gaskell material, and some of the items will be specially displayed for us. On the Sunday, we plan to visit the house in Thornton where Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë were born, when their father, the Rev Patrick, was serving as a curate before moving to Haworth. The house has been recently restored, and was opened as an attraction by HM Queen Camilla in May 2025.
On our coach journey home, plans are in progress for an additional trip to East Riddlesden Hall (to be confirmed), a National Trust historic manor house.
We very much hope that you’ll choose to join us to enjoy some fresh Yorkshire air and some fresh Gaskell ideas. See below for costs and booking details. We’ll publish a detailed timetable very soon. In the meantime, here are the details of our presentations and speakers.
Our Speakers
Kindred Pens: Elizabeth Gaskell, Henrietta Jenkin, and Giovanni Ruffini within Victorian Literary Networks
Raffaella Antinucci
This paper examines Elizabeth Gaskell’s professional and literary links with novelists Henrietta Jenkyn (1808-1885) and Giovanni Ruffini (1807-1881) to shed new light on her position within mid-nineteenth-century literary networks. Her role as intermediary for Jenkyn, who sent manuscripts via Gaskell to editors such as George Smith and William Chambers, and her awareness of Ruffini, whose exile novels circulated in the same publishing milieu, reveal a broader, cosmopolitan dimension to her intellectual world.
By situating these indirect, yet significant, connections within a transnational context, the paper argues that Gaskell’s “literary links” extend beyond domestic realism, encompassing networks shaped by social, cultural, and moral concerns. In mediating, observing, and engaging with fellow writers, Gaskell functioned as both a facilitator and participant in British and European literary exchange.
Raffaella Antinucci is Professor of English Literature at Parthenope University of Naples, where she directs the CRILLS (Research Centre for Foreign Languages and Literatures), and former Lecturer in Italian at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK). Her main areas of research include Victorian culture and fiction, corpus stylistics, and comparative literatures, with a special focus on the Anglo-Italian relations in the years of the Risorgimento. She is the author of a monograph on the literary representations of the Victorian gentleman (2009), a study on Jane Austen’s Emma (2017) and of several articles on Victorian and modernist writers. She edited the first Italian translation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Moorland Cottage (La casa nella brughiera, 2016) and Right at Last (All’ultimo momento, 2020). She is a member of CUSVE (the Italian Centre for Victorian and Edwardian Studies) and on the editorial board of the academic journals Traduttologia, Fictions and CounterText.
Cultures of Risk in Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau
Ben Moore
Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau moved in the same Unitarian circles, and while not close friends, their paths often crossed. They were certainly familiar with one another’s writing, and were both concerned with questions of political economy. This paper focuses on one dimension of this shared concern: the problem of risk (of injury, illness, financial ruin, unemployment and so on) under conditions of capitalist modernity.
Ben Moore compares the cultures of risk depicted by these two authors, arguing that they present related, but distinct, characteristics. For Martineau, risk is not only something mitigated by laws of political economy, but also a feature of modern life that should be more fairly distributed. In Gaskell, risk introduces a contingency that both puts lives at risk and drives the progress of the plot. Ben’s discussion takes in Gaskell’s Mary Barton alongside Martineau’s stories A Manchester Strike, Sowers not Reapers and Cinnamon and Pearls.
Ben Moore is Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2024) and Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850–1895 (2023). His work on nineteenth-century literature and related topics has appeared in various journals, handbooks and edited collections. He is the Secretary of the Dickens Society and Co-Editor of the Gaskell Journal.
Title to be supplied
Tracy Stobbe
The Victorian period was a time of adjustment to new economic realities. As the Industrial Revolution continued to deepen its reach, it transformed almost every aspect of life: these changes were memorably recorded by novelists of the time. However, there is ongoing debate among both literary critics and economists who study literature as to whether Victorian writers accurately understood what they saw. Novels such as Dickens’s Hard Times portray the grim side of the Industrial Revolution, but is progress and advancement in living standards equally as celebrated in the novels of the era?
This research agenda looks at Victorian literature with an economist’s eye, using a data-driven research methodology. It attempts to offer some quantitative findings about the frequency of positive, neutral, and negative comments about the economy. The goal is to investigate issues of accuracy, tone and bias, as some literary scholars have identified Victorian writers to be biased when it comes to describing markets and the economy. The paper will examine North and South, Mary Barton, and Cranford, using a data-laden approach to analyse key themes.
Tracy Stobbe holds a PhD in Economics (University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada) and has taught at Trinity Western University since 2007. Her research from 2005-2021 was concerned with environmental and agricultural economics. However, in 2021, she turned her attention to her secondary field (from her doctorate) – the history of economic thought. Combining this interest in the history of economics – particularly of the British Industrial Revolution – with a longstanding interest in literature resulted in the research agenda described above.
To be confirmed
Mrs Gaskell and her Publishers
Kate Raine
This talk will consider the relationship between Elizabeth Gaskell and her publishers. There will be a brief overview of the character, life and business of each publisher, alongside their relationship and business dealings with Mrs Gaskell.
Kate will also consider their place in Mrs Gaskell’s wider social network of friends and acquaintances with a focus on another author linked with the publisher – William Howitt & Maria Edgeworth, Chapman & Hall & Elizabeth Barrett Browning (John Forster & Charles Dickens), Sampson Low & Harriet Beecher Stowe, Smith, Elder & Co. & Charlotte Brontë.
Kate Raine is a Historical Researcher and Writer. She is currently pursuing a personal interest into the life of Edmund Potter, calico printer, MP & philanthropist, and Manchester society in the nineteenth century.
“[D]ear little town”: Writing the Region in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866)
Marie-Gaëlle Drouet
Wives and Daughters (1866) is a prime example of what may be called a regional poet(h)ics, considering that its regional setting is key to fostering ethical and human values, such as bravery, care, solidarity or devotion.
Gaskell’s own experience of provincial life fuels her representation of Hollingford as a multi-layered community and gossiping social microcosm set in a semi-rural landscape. Yet it seems that in Wives and Daughters, a sense of the region is first of all provided by the heroine Molly Gibson’s unfailing attachment and dedication to the local community. More precisely, a variety of connective practices contribute to shaping the ethical framework of the neighbourhood. The geographical ethics of Wives and Daughters are also based upon horticultural practices, as indicated by Molly’s care for her vegetal surroundings, which signals a broader, ethical commitment to her social and regional environment.
Marie-Gaëlle Drouet is a second-year PhD student, under the supervision of Professor Nathalie Vanfasse (Aix-Marseille Université) & Benjamine Toussaint (Sorbonne Université).
Ebbing and flowing for ever and ever’: Fairy-Tale Epistemologies and Temporalities in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Curious, if True’
Scarlette-Electra LeBlanc
This paper examines the competing epistemologies and temporalities presented in Elizabeth Gaskell’s short story ‘Curious, if True’. Her story reimagines the fates of several fairy-tale characters by picking up several years after their known stories end, via the intrusion of Richard Whittingham, an ordinary Englishman, onto a party attended by these beings. This paper explores the consequences of Gaskell applying linear, human time to characters we are used to conceptualising as existing within the perpetually unfading fairy-tale time of ‘happily ever after’.
Unlike Whittingham’s world, where the past is composed of an objective written record, these characters’ pasts are fluid and immaterial, as pliable as any oral narrative. In oral tradition, it is the dominant, most repeated iteration of a tale which becomes the ‘true’ version, and this is based only off what is the most widely spread and understood narrative in a certain region over a specific period. In practice, this closely resembles the spread of gossip — if enough people believe something, then who is to say it is not true?
Scarlette-Electra LeBlanc is a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar in English at the University of Hull. She holds a BA (Hons) in English from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and an MLitt in Romantic and Victorian Studies from the University of St Andrews. Her research interests include 19th century women’s identity formation, fairy-tale retellings, and the Gothic. Her recent essay on Cranford was published in the 2024 issue of The Gaskell Journal.
Threads of Connections: Dress and the Literary Links between Gaskell and Sensation Fiction’
Hannah Trifunovic
Elizabeth Gaskell had a sustained and explicit interest in dress, which was often the subject of her writings. In her novels, particularly North and South, Gaskell uses dress as a literary device to link her fiction with the wider worlds of politics and culture, mediating questions of gender, class, and Victorian socioeconomic conditions. I argue that the full significance of this concept, however, emerges only when considering the diverse perspectives through which the heroine’s dress is observed and interpreted; in other words, the meaning of dress is shaped by the heroine’s self-presentation and by the interpretations of those around her.
This paper will argue that Gaskell’s use of dress in North and South establishes a literary link with sensation fiction, particularly in the works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins. Despite differences in narrative form, Braddon and Collins similarly use dress to mediate the same questions. I will demonstrate this by comparing North and South with Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Collins’s Armadale, showing that although the industrial heroine functions differently from the sensation heroine, diverse character perspectives on both heroines work in similar ways in that they reveal comparable social anxieties, especially regarding women and class.
Hannah Trifunovic is a fourth-year PhD student of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her thesis explores fashion and clothing in Victorian novels.
Bookings
The Conference is £475 for delegates in a single occupancy room, or £370 per person for two sharing a twin room. The fee includes accommodation, activities (including talks, outings and entertainment) and food. We’ll offer return coach transport from the North West of England (for a small extra charge) with pick-ups in Knutsford, Macclesfield and Manchester for those who would find it useful. Do let us know on the booking form.
To book your place, please use the link below to the booking form (you can type and email, or print and post). Then send a non-refundable deposit of £75 (preferably by bank transfer) by 1 April 2026. The balance for your booking will be payable by 29 May 2026. The booking form carries more information about bank details, posting and paying by cheque.
If you have any questions or require any further information, please contact Geraldine Hughes, who will be happy to help.