This new collection assembles fourteen original essays on Elizabeth Gaskell and her work by some of the leading Gaskell scholars, including Joanne Shattock and Alan Shelston. It also introduces
the work of younger scholars exploring the varied discourses, ideologies, and contexts that characterize Gaskell's writing. Focusing on examinations of texts ranging from Gaskell's journalism
to her letters, short stories, and novels, the collection provides useful modern approaches to the author's oeuvre. The book investigates questions of class and gender (such as the role of the
Victorian woman and Victorian masculinity), Darwinian evolution theory, medicine, friendship, and the literary tradition (including Wordsworth's presence in Gaskell's early writing). Above all,
the collection offers a fresh consideration of this important Victorian novelist, while also raising questions about future directions for Gaskell scholars, and makes a central contribution to
the contemporary understanding of a writer who is no longer merely seen as the author of social problem fiction, but whose ideational and ideological range reveals her as an accomplished master
of form and generic conventions.
