Elizabeth Gaskell’s final novel Wives and Daughters explores the Victorian interest in science and logic through the character of Roger Hamley and the gentleman scientist Lord Hollingford. Roger was heavily based on the famous evolutionary scientist, and author of The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin. Wives and Daughters was Darwin’s favourite novel and he […]

Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell are two of the nation’s best-loved authors. Rightly lauded for their classic works, they are often depicted as writing about marriage and the narrow social confines of women’s lives. Now, we look at them afresh as we explore the ‘domestic novel’ of the 19th century. Many Georgian and Victorian stories […]

Two giants of Victorian literature, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot were very different in almost every way. George Eliot was private and intellectual while Elizabeth was outgoing, gossipy and deeply shocked by the scandal of her fellow writer’s personal life. So how did these differences affect their work? How did they approach similar themes such […]

Elizabeth Gaskell’s last novel, Wives and Daughters, explored the position of women in 19th century society and the pressure on them to marry. Her book had much to say about marriage, including storylines like Mrs Gibson’s marriage of necessity, Cynthia’s secret engagement and Molly’s hoped-for love-match. Now we compare fiction with reality in this special […]

A talk to mark the bi-centary year of Lord Byron. Step into the dark side to look at literary vampires, starting with his unfinished novel The Burial: A Fragment. Byron’s supernatural story may have been the first in English to feature a vampire but it certainly was not the last and many that followed featured […]

Manchester is the dramatic backdrop to literary classics, such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, and lesser-known works, such as Isabella Banks’s The Manchester Man. The city has been at the forefront of industrial change and political radicalism but what about literature? How have events from the Industrial Revolution to Peterloo inspired writers? How are the lives of […]