Elizabeth Gaskell, Victorian Culture, and the Art of Fiction: Essays for the Bicentenary, assembles 14 original essays on Gaskell and her work by some of the leading Gaskell scholars such as Joanne Shattock and Alan Shelston, and also introduces the work of younger scholars exploring the varied discourses, ideologies, and contexts that characterise Gaskell’s writing. Focusing on examinations of texts ranging from Gaskell’s journalism, letters, short stories, and novels, the collection aims to provide useful modern approaches to the author’s oeuvre. Contributions investigate questions of class and gender (such as the role of the Victorian woman and Victorian masculinity), Darwinian evolution theory, medicine, friendship, and the literary tradition (including Wordsworth’s presence in Gaskell’s early writing). Above all, the collection offers a fresh consideration of this important Victorian novelist, while also raising questions about future directions for Gaskell scholars, and makes a central contribution to the contemporary understanding of a writer who is no longer merely seen as the author – albeit an important one – of social problem fiction, but whose ideational and ideological range reveals her as an accomplished master of form and generic conventions.

Sandro Jung (ed.) is Professor of Early Modern British Literature at Ghent University.

This is a book of essays that powerfully underlines the diversity of genres and variety of interests represented in Elizabeth Gaskell’s writing. Such a breadth of view, allied to the book’s convincing evidence of Gaskell’s continuing interest for scholars of many nationalities, is particularly to be welcomed at the two hundredth anniversary of her birth. The book provides strong evidence of ways in which Gaskell’s work remains open to innovative and original interpretation.
Brian Maidment
Research Professor in the History of Print Culture
University of Salford