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This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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North and South was first published in book form in 1855. The title reflects a main theme of the book: the contrast between the industrial north and the wealthier south of England. ... Read more

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A great deal has been written about Elizabeth Gaskell in the last decade. This extensively annotated guide to the literature builds upon Weyant's 1994 work on Gaskell that covered some 350 sources published between 1976-1991. This supplement identifies almost 600 new books, book chapters, journal articles, dissertations, masters theses and honors theses on the life and writings of Gaskell published since 1991. ... Read more

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In this Readers' Guide, Alison Chapman introduces and discusses the patterns of critical attention that Gaskell's work has attracted across the past hundred and fifty years.Beginning with contemporary press and critical reviews, and treatments by the Victorian and early twentieth-century literary establishment, the Guide sets out a background for the most recent and challenging reassessments of these novels, bringing the reader fully up to date on current critical approaches.
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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

not worth the bother
I found A Dark Night's Work to be very tedious to read as it gets too bogged down in old fashioned, formal language and social class ideals. The story, although potentially interesting, is very slow moving and in the end i decided not to waste time finishing it. Apologies to the author,but that's how I see it.

Don't let the publication date scare you off!
Published in 1863, A Dark Night's Work is the story of Ellinor Wilkins, daughter to a well-to-do country lawyer in rural England. Having lost her mother and sister at a very young age, Ellinor develops an intense bond with her father and enjoys all of his attention and financial comforts throughout her childhood.

Her bond with Mr. Wilkins is so strong that, as is wont to happen in these circumstances, Ellinor is also blind to his faults, not the least of which are an over-reaching pride and drunkenness. As Ellinor grows into adulthood, she will eventually meet and become engaged to a young man of a noble family.

Just as she is about to float blindly from one comfortable life with her father into another with a husband, tragedy strikes.

Mr. Wilkins, in a fit of drunken rage, commits murder. Desperate to avoid the disgrace, Ellinor, her father and a family servant hide the body.

From here on out, the story is chiefly concerned with the effects of a guilty conscious. Each person concerned deals with the guilt in devastating ways and the effects are far-reaching into the future.

Gaskell's forte with this novella is her examination of character and tragedy. She foreshadows early in the story,

"...it is approaching all of us at this very time; you, reader, I, writer, have each our great sorrow bearing down on us. It may be yet beyond the dimmest point of our horizon, but in the stillness of the night our hearts shrink at the sound of its coming footstep. Well is it for those who fall into the hands of the Lord rather than into the hands of men; but worst of all is it for him who has hereafter to mingle the gall of remorse with the cup held out to him by his doom."
(A Dark Night's Work, Elizabeth Gaskell)


Very gothic, no?

Gaskell doesn't attempt to develop much sympathy for Ellinor's plight. Rather, she simply states facts without sentiment and allows the reader's to draw their own conclusions. You may, as you read her story, determine that Ellinor gets everything she had coming to her. Or you may decide the consequences are rather too harsh.

Either way, the novella is a story with dark undertones of family dynamics and social mores, rather impressive for the time frame and rather reminds us of Edith Wharton's darker works which weren't to come along for another fifty years. Well worth the download and the time to read it! ... Read more

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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

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Writing during periods of dramatic social change, Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell were both attracted to the idea of radical societal transformation at the same time that their writings express nostalgia for a traditional, paternalistic ruling class. Julie Nash shows how this tension is played out especially through the characters of servants in short fiction and novels such as Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent", "Belinda", and Helen and Gaskell's "North and South" and "Cranford". Servant characters, Nash contends, enable these writers to give voice to the contradictions inherent in the popular paternalistic philosophy of their times because the situation of domestic servitude itself embodies such inconsistencies. Servants, whose labor was essential to the economic and social function of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British society, made up the largest category of workers in England by the nineteenth century and yet were expected to be socially invisible. At the same time, they lived in the same houses as their masters and mistresses and were privy to the most intimate details of their lives.Both Edgeworth and Gaskell created servant characters who challenge the social hierarchy, thus exposing the potential for dehumanization and corruption inherent in the paternalistic philosophy. Nash's study opens up important avenues for future scholars of women's fiction in the nineteenth century. ... Read more

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"I can't help it, dear, dear Hester," said she, crying, "if they did not; I never looked at her feet, but she held my hand fast and tight in her little one, and it was very, very cold. She took me up the Fell-path, up to the holly-trees; and there I saw a lady weeping and crying; but when she saw me, she hushed her weeping, and smiled very proud and grand, and took me on her knee. ... Read more

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Hardly the Victorian conservative she is often thought to be, Elizabeth Gaskell explored through her fiction subjects, such as prostitution, industrial conflict, and evolutionary theory, that were too daunting for most 19th-century women writers. This book uncovers the tactics of disguise which Gaskell skillfully employed in order to evade prescribed notions of what a Victorian woman writer should write. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The critical work to read on Gaskell
This is an excellent, finely tuned study of Gaskell. It investigates Gaskell as an artist caught up in ambivalent, conflicting goals. When so much work on Gaskell flattens her into an unbridled politico, this book traces the complex relationship between her social intentions and her artistic ones. And it reads all the novels but _Cranford_, including the neglected _Sylvia's Lovers_.

why we love dierdre d'albertis
There aren't enough books about Elizabeth Gaskell. D'Albertis has stunningly filled what heretofore had been a Gaskell void. Yea, Dierdre!This sort of scholarship is rarely seen amongst Victorian scholars,particulalrly female ones. Fabulous!

A new voice for a new era in Gaskell studies
The burgeoning interest in Elizabeth Gaskell has at last produced an author with the cogent prose style and analytical brilliance to match the subject. Brava d'Albertis! It reminds me of the impact of reading Axel's Castle in 1931. ... Read more

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This study deals with the whole range of Gaskell's fiction, approaching her as a deeply poetic novelist and short-story writer. Among topics covered are women and the creation of the self, death and personal integrity, the status of words as utterance and the shape and meaning of individual lives. While seeing her as a product of her age, Wright transcends narrow categorizations of her work to read her "whole" as a subtle exponent of the values of a humane realism. ... Read more

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Elizabeth Gaskell's work and life are being rediscovered against a backdrop of Victorian middle-class women's experience by many feminist scholars. Viewed in this century as conventional and conservative, Gaskell may instead be regarded as a radical for her time, because she challenged widely-held assumptions about the nature of women, their proper sphere, and their participation in the public realm. Examining the theme of work in Gaskell's novels, Colby presents this Victorian novelist as an effective advocate of change as she tried to create space for women within the world of work. ... Read more

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In Two Volumes. This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature. ... Read more

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Dr. Camus' study first tries to reinstate Gaskell as one of the significant novelists of the mid Victorian period through looking at her work as a whole, avoiding the usual dividing line between her condition-of-England novels and her more intimate fiction. It then aims at inscribing Gaskell in the tradition of women writers who wrote not only for literary posterity but also to express and defend a woman's vision of the world. The feminist aspect of Gaskell's writing is uncovered here in all its determination but also in its hesitations. ... Read more