Where to Start with Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford, North and South, and Beyond

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote two quite different kinds of novel. One kind is set in a small country town and runs on gossip, tea, and the careful management of small incomes. The other is set in an industrial city and runs on strikes, wages, and the distance between mill owners and the people who work for them. Readers who pick the wrong kind first sometimes decide she is not for them.

This guide describes four novels so that you can choose the kind you want. Openings, structure, and voice are covered. Endings and late turns are not, with one exception that the unfinished Wives and Daughters forces on any honest guide, and that exception is flagged where it comes.

First choice: Cranford

“In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons.” The town’s houses above a certain rent all belong to women; husbands, where they exist, have been frightened off or are away at business in the commercial town of Drumble, twenty miles down the railway. The narrator is a younger woman who visits regularly and reports what she sees.¹

The book is short, sixteen chapters, and each chapter is close to a self-contained episode: a visit, a panic about burglars, a conjuror’s performance, a long-ago love affair recalled over old letters. Chapter titles such as “Our Society,” “The Captain,” and “Visiting” are accurate labels. You can read a chapter in a sitting and put the book down without losing a thread, which makes it a good choice for someone with scattered reading time.

Watch Miss Matty. The comedy of economy, of candles and cows and the elegant pretence that nobody minds being poor, is built around her, and the later chapters give the comedy weight without changing its tone. If you want to know what Gaskell’s humour sounds like before trying anything longer, this is the book.

Second choice: North and South

The novel opens in a back drawing-room in Harley Street, London, where Margaret Hale is watching her cousin Edith sleep on a sofa before a wedding. Margaret soon returns to her father’s parsonage in the southern village of Helstone, and a decision of his moves the family north to the manufacturing town of Milton.²

Fifty-two chapters with titles, no book divisions. The chapter titles trace the argument of the novel as much as its events: “Masters and Men,” “What Is a Strike?,” “Men and Gentlemen,” “Union Not Always Strength,” “Looking South.” Margaret’s opinions about trade and the people in it are tested against John Thornton, a mill owner, and against the Higgins family, who work in the mills.

Read the conversations between Margaret and Thornton as arguments first and as a courtship second. Gaskell gives both sides real cases to make, and the industrial chapters stand on their own even for a reader with no interest in the romance. Those who do care about the romance will find that Gaskell makes them wait, and that the waiting is the point.

Third choice: Mary Barton

Gaskell’s preface explains that she had planned a rural tale set a century earlier, and then thought instead about the care-worn men who elbowed her daily in the streets of Manchester, swinging between work and want. The result was her first novel, subtitled A Tale of Manchester Life.³

Thirty-eight chapters, each with a descriptive heading and a verse epigraph. Mary is a dressmaker’s apprentice; her father John Barton is a weaver who grows angrier as the trade worsens. The first half is a set of Manchester interiors, tea parties and sickrooms, with the dialect of Lancashire speech written out in full. The second half becomes a very different book: the chapter headings announce a crime and a trial, and the pace tightens accordingly.

It is the roughest of the four, written before Gaskell had learnt to balance a plot, and it is also the most direct about hunger. Start here if that directness is what draws you to the period, or read it after North and South to see how far she had come in six years.

Fourth choice: Wives and Daughters

The first chapter begins with “the old rigmarole of childhood”: in a country there was a shire, in that shire a town, in that town a house, and in a bed in that house a little girl lying awake and waiting to be allowed up. The girl is Molly Gibson, daughter of the doctor in the town of Hollingford, and the novel follows her into young womanhood.⁴

Sixty chapters with titles. Molly’s father remarries, a stepsister named Cynthia arrives, and the Hamley family at the hall nearby, a squire and his two sons, become the other half of the book. It is Gaskell’s longest novel and in many readers’ view her best, with the Cranford humour and the North and South seriousness in one place.

It is also unfinished. Gaskell died before the final instalment was written, and the Gutenberg text ends with a note headed “Concluding Remarks” by the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, where the novel was being serialized. That note states what the last chapters were going to contain. Readers who prefer to form their own expectations should stop at the end of Chapter LX and treat the editor’s page as optional; those who want to know can read it. This guide repeats none of it.

Which novel to open first

For most readers Cranford is the lowest-risk start and North and South the most rewarding second book. Wives and Daughters is worth saving for when you already trust the author. If you enjoyed George Eliot’s provincial towns, Gaskell’s Hollingford and Cranford are the nearest neighbours; the George Eliot guide can help you place the two writers side by side.

Dialect and period language

Gaskell writes working-class Lancashire speech phonetically, especially in Mary Barton and North and South. The first few speeches are slow; after that the spellings become patterns. If a word stops you, the narration around it usually carries the sense, and a built-in dictionary in BlueReader can be opened from the text without leaving the page.

She also uses the vocabulary of her time for class, religion, and nationality, and some characters express views about the poor, about Irish workers, or about women that the novels examine rather than share. Treat these as part of the argument the book is making.

Content notes

Mary Barton includes death from illness and starvation, a murder, and a trial. North and South includes a strike that turns violent, several deaths, and a long period of grief. Cranford is the gentlest but has a bank failure and bereavement among its episodes. Wives and Daughters includes serious illness and death within the Hamley family. None of these books describes violence at length, but all four treat poverty and loss as everyday facts rather than plot devices.

How to read them

All four are free on Project Gutenberg. Download the EPUB, upload it to BlueReader, and wait for the server to process the file; the book then opens from your bookshelf and your position syncs between devices.⁵ Cranford can be read in a weekend. For the longer novels, aim for a handful of chapters a session; the titles make it easy to recall where you stopped.

Gutenberg sometimes lists more than one edition of a title. The eBook numbers below are the ones used for this guide. For other places to find free EPUBs, see our free EPUB guide. Readers who want a comforting book rather than an industrial one might also look at comfort classics.