5/19/2023 0 Comments Cranford author elizabethThey settled in the city and she helped with his work, offering support to the poor and teaching in the Sunday School, where reading and writing were taught, as well as scripture. He was the assistant minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester at the time. It was this lively and attractive young woman who married William Gaskell in 1832. He painted the famous portrait of Elizabeth in 1832 (pictured, left). Her father had remarried when she was four, and her stepmother, Catherine Thomson, was a sister of the Scottish miniature artist, William John Thomson. Knutsford, a small country town, later became the inspiration for Cranford, and also for Hollingford in Wives and Daughters.Įlizabeth also spent some time in Edinburgh and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Their house, then named The Heath but now Heathwaite House, still stands on what is now called Gaskell Avenue. Mrs Stevenson died on 29 October 1811, and so at the age of just 13 months, the baby Elizabeth (later known as Lily) was sent to Knutsford in Cheshire to spend her childhood with her mother’s sister, Aunt Hannah Lumb, whom she was later to describe as her ‘more than mother’. She was the daughter of William Stevenson – a treasury official and journalist – and his wife Elizabeth Stevenson (née Holland). “To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood…” Wives and Daughters (1866) (Chapter 1)Įlizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-65) was born on 29 September 1810 in Lindsey Row, Chelsea, at the house which is now 93 Cheyne Walk.
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