Born Elizabeth Stevenson in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, in 1810, she lost her mother the same year and was brought up by an aunt in Knutsford, a small town in leafy Cheshire. She looked destined for a life of boring gentility, but that was never in her make-up.
Her marriage in 1832 to William Gaskell proved a turning point. William was a junior minister at Manchester's famous Cross Street Unitarian Chapel and her move to the smoky industrial city opened her eyes.
She embarked on a detailed study of the lives of working men and women and the result was a novel, Mary Barton, published anonymously in 1848.
Mary Barton is the story of a weaver who watches his wife and baby son starve to death when his workplace closes during a depression, and as a result becomes a Chartist activist and an opium addict.
His daughter Mary survives and finds herself at the centre of a love triangle, torn between the son of a factory owner and a worker. The plot might sound Mills-and-Boonish but it gives Gaskell a chance to paint an intimate and revealing portrait of working-class lives.
Other Gaskell novels followed, some of them, like Cranford (1853), which is based on Knutsford, set in gentler surroundings, but she returned to the industrial theme in 1855 with North and South.
Some influential Manchester men, including industrialist William Rathbone Greg of the Quarry Bank Mill dynasty, had been incensed by Mary Barton, and this may have had an effect on her when she wrote North and South. She could have been influenced, too, by her friendship with James Nasmyth, owner of the Bridgewater Foundry at Irlam, Manchester, and inventor of the steam hammer, who had a reputation as a more enlightened employer. The character of John Thornton, in the book, is possibly modelled on Nasmyth.
Even so, the book dwells at some length on suffering and privation without managing to come up with any realistic solution to Manchester's many ills, other than to propose a return to the principles of love and Christianity.
Mrs Gaskell also wrote the biography of fellow-novelist Charlotte Bronte in 1857.
