
Mary Barton
Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life was the first novel by English author Elizabeth Gaskell, first published. Mary Barton is set in the English city of Manchester, and takes up the difficulties faced by the Victorian working class.
Author
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810–1865) is represented here by 6 public-domain titles, including An Accursed Race, Cranford, and Mary Barton. This page is a shelf list: the books are read on Open Library, not stored here.

Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life was the first novel by English author Elizabeth Gaskell, first published. Mary Barton is set in the English city of Manchester, and takes up the difficulties faced by the Victorian working class.

Wives and Daughters was partly written whilst Gaskell was staying with the salon hostess Mary Elizabeth Mohl at her home on the Rue du Bac in Paris. When Mrs Gaskell died suddenly in 1865, it was not quite complete, and the last section was written by Frederick Greenwood.

At first, Gaskell wanted the novel to be titled after the heroine, Margaret Hale, but Charles Dickens, the editor of Household Words, the magazine in which the novel was serialised, insisted on North and South. Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, focused on relations between employers and workers in Manchester from the perspective of the working poor; North and South uses a protagonist from southern England to show and comment on the perspectives of mill owners and workers in an industrialising city.

Sylvia's Lovers is a novel by English author Elizabeth Gaskell, which she called "the saddest story I ever wrote".

It first appeared in instalments in the magazine Household Words, then was published with minor revisions as a book with the title Cranford. Cranford slowly became popular and from the start of the 20th century it saw a number of dramatic treatments for the stage, the radio and TV.