The Old Nurse's Story

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was a highly popular, sometimes controversial, author of fiction during the early Victorian period. Her work is now noted for its focus on women’s roles and class dynamics, as well as its rich characterization and an approach toward Christian virtues and social mores that sometimes defied accepted thought at the time.

Gaskell was born Elizabeth Stephenson to upper-middle-class parents in London. Her mother died when Elizabeth was an infant and her father sent her to be raised by Unitarian aunts living in Cheshire. She was well-educated and traveled in Britain and Europe as a young woman. In 1832, Elizabeth married William Gaskell, a Manchester clergyman, and took an active role in the relief work of his working-class parish. After the death of their infant son William, her husband encouraged her to take up writing. Her first novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester (1848) places its heroine as a northern urban factory worker, in a realistic community whose economic struggles Gaskell was sure her (mostly southern, wealthy) readers did not understand. Gaskell usually set her fiction in the “Industrial North,” most often in urban centers, and occasionally in the countryside, as she does with “The Old Nurse’s Story.” She published “The Old Nurse’s Story” while she was also finishing the series of tales that she would shortly publish as the novella Cranford (1853), a tale focused around the lives and society of gentlewomen living in a fictional country town.

Gaskell maintained an active authorial life while also raising four daughters and continuing to serve the poorer community in Manchester. Her view and experience of women’s lives diverged from the representations of women she found in existing literature and she sought to write more realistic narratives from a woman’s perspective. Gaskell maintained her role as a wife, mother, and homemaker, while active in the charitable and social role of clergyman’s wife and entering into public matters in the city of Manchester. Her writing was highly successful and created a good income. Gaskell was intimate with numerous celebrated artists, writers, and social reformers, including the Brontës, Dickens, and Ruskin.