The 2026 Gaskell Society Conference will be held in the delightful West Yorkshire spa town of Ilkley,  from Saturday 11 to Monday 13 July. Our theme is 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 in both Europe and America. Gaskell was also a regular contributor to popular periodicals such as Household Words, All the Year Round and The Cornhill and three of her major novels and many of her short stories were published in serial format which had an impact on the pace, style and content of the work.

The links between her writing and the world of politics, literature and culture are vast and are frequently reflected in her writings.  For the purposes of a broad scope of ideas for papers, we have tried to keep the headings fairly general so that they can be interpreted in a number of different ways.  Overall, this conference hopes to look at a variety of topics which could include some of the following, however other relevant ideas will be considered:

• Elizabeth Gaskell’s writing and the culture of Manchester.
• Gaskell’s writing and national politics.
• Gaskell’s role in the development of the Regional Novel.
• Gaskell’s links with Romanticism and its prose writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth and Mary Shelley.
• Gaskell’s influence on the later Victorian novelists such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.
• Links with Sensation fiction and the novels of Wilkie Collins and Mary Braddon.
• Gaskell’s publishers and their influence on her writing.
• Gaskell and the periodical press. 
• Oppositional cultures – Gaskell’s representations of the North and the South in her writings. 
• Gaskell’s use of genre in her writings.