The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements 

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Elizabeth Ludlow and Rebecca Styler

Part I: Texts

 1. Correspondence, Sociability, and Elizabeth Gaskell

Anne Longmuir

2. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Professional Writing Life

Joanne Shattock

 3. ‘Phantoms of the Past’: Domestic Terror and Family Secrets in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘A Manchester Marriage’, ‘Lizzie Leigh’ and A Dark Night’s Work

Emma Liggins

4. Want, Famine and Faith: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Historical Short Fiction 

Sara Malton

5. Sympathy, Grief and Contagious Emotions in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton

David McAllister

6. Female Slapstick in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford: Bodies, Patriarchy, Agency

Louise Lee

7. Women’s Work and the Industrial Context in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fallen Woman Novel Ruth

Michelle Beth Chong

8. The Social Lives of Books in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

Marcela Santos Brigida

9. ‘Flawed masterpiece’: Biography, Reviews and Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Claire O’Callaghan

10. The Darwinian Landscape of Sylvia's Lovers: Elizabeth Gaskell's Novel of Struggle and Despair

Lauren Cameron

11. Nurturing Science in Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters

Tamara Wagner

Part II: Themes

12. Architecture and the Built Environment: Heterogeneous Spaces and Semi-Permeable Thresholds in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Writing

Ben Moore

13. Getting '[be]wildered on the fells': Navigating Upland Ecologies in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cumbrian Tales

Anna Burton

14. Queer Approaches to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction

Jessica Campbell

15. Elizabeth Gaskell and Religion: The Time of the Kingdom of God

Elizabeth Ludlow

16. Elizabeth Gaskell and Simplicity: The Aesthetics of Virtue and Class Prejudice

Jo Carruthers

17. Elizabeth Gaskell and Material Culture: Mary Barton’s Ragged Valentine

Monica F. Cohen

18. Women’s Empowerment in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Pre-Raphaelite Reconfigurations

Sophia Andres

19. Global Gaskell, Manchester and the Abolitionist Struggle

Ingrid Hanson

20. Race, Patriarchy, and Empire in Gaskell’s Accounts of Systemic Injustice beyond ‘Manchester Life’

Maeve Adams

21. Death, Dying, and the Rites of Mourning in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction

Josie Billington

Part III: Legacies

22. Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Stage

Julianne Smith

23. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Transatlantic Legacies: Margaret Hale’s Daughters in Nineteenth-Century US Industrial Fiction

Rebecca Styler

24. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cultural Reception: Illustration, Appropriation, and Fan Fiction                                                    

Thomas Recchio

25. Transmedia Gaskell: Two Web Series Adaptations of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

Chris Louttit

Index

Biography

Elizabeth Ludlow is Associate Professor of Literature and Religion at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. She is the author of Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints (2014) and Prayer and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (2025), the editor of The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020), and co-editor, with Koenraad Claes, of The Nineteenth-Century Present: Literature, Print Culture and Historicity (2025). She has published work on the literary and artistic legacy of St Monica of Hippo and on authors including Elizabeth Gaskell, Josephine Butler, George Eliot, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Rebecca Styler is Associate Professor of English at the University of Lincoln, UK. She is author of Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (2010) and The Maternal Image of God in Victorian Literature (2024). She is editor of Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society: Traditions (2020), and is co-editor of the Gaskell Journal. She has published chapters and articles on religious innovations in nineteenth-century literature by women including Elizabeth Gaskell, Josephine Butler, and Charlotte Brontë, and by authors of utopian texts, ghost stories, and spiritual auto/biography.