Elizabeth gaskell brief biography of benjamin

Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson Gaskell

She was born in Chelsea, London, the eighth and last child of William Stevenson and Elizabeth Holland Stevenson. Little is known of her mother except that she came of a prosperous family and died when Elizabeth was thirteen months old.

Her one surviving brother, John, disappeared while in the marine service.

Elizabeth gaskell brief biography of benjamin

Her father had been a Unitarian minister but resigned his orders on conscientious grounds. He had tried scientific farming, and was an editor and contributor to Scottish periodicals. Although he lived until his daughter was nineteen, she was actually raised by an aunt and cousin, Hannah and Marianne Lund, in Knutsford, Cheshire.

Elizabeth was very close to her aunt and deeply loved the country town in which she grew up, and which she fictionalized in later novels such as Cranford.

Elizabeth Stevenson was educated in a fashionable school in Stratford-upon-Avon.

She visited London where she nursed her father in his last illness, and visited