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EGElizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell

Life dates: 1810 AD — 1865 AD

English novelist whose scenes place judgments and personal feeling alongside social responsibilities. A character’s argument is best understood with the situation that gives it force.

▷ Play this voiceSearch these words ↗Place in time ↗lifelovemindtimewisdomjusticeknowledgetruth

Life and writing

Elizabeth Gaskell lived from 1810 to 1865 and made her home with her family in Manchester. Her house museum documents that lifetime and the family setting. This profile connects the existing Elizabeth Gaskell archive label to checked biographical references and a complete novel, rather than creating a new author identity. The link gives useful context for reading supplied excerpts while preserving the collection’s uncertainty about the wider set of individual attributions.

Chapter XIV of the linked North and South gives Margaret a speech about resisting unjust power while her family discusses Frederick’s circumstances. Chapter XL describes Thornton’s conflicting feelings through the narrator. The two selected archive passages match those chapters under case, punctuation and spacing comparison. Their different voices matter: the moral argument belongs to a character in a particular discussion, and the description of jealousy is narration rather than a declaration of the novelist’s own feelings.

Reading this voice

Read chapters XIV and XL, identifying the speaker and what has happened before each passage. The two selected contributor records have checked locations in this Walter Scott edition; their original wording and uncertainty labels remain. The 96 associated records are not all authenticated by those comparisons. Profile lifetime years do not establish the composition date of an excerpt or resolve separate historical attribution questions.

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Quotations and sayings

14Undated
He had tenderness in his heart — ‘a soft place,’ as Nicholas Higgins called it; but he had some pride in concealing it; he kept it very sacred and safe, and was jealous of every circumstance that tried to gain admission. But if he dreaded exposure of his tenderness, he was equally desirous that all men should recognize his justice; and he felt that he had been unjust, in giving so scornful a hearing to anyone who had waited, with humble patience, for five hours, to speak to him.
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