HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

Cranford (Collins Classics)

Literature & Fiction

GASKELL, Elizabeth

Classics

HarperPress

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 
‘But the cloud never comes in that quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.’ 
When Margaret Hale is uprooted from Hampshire and moves to the industrial town of Milton in the North of England, her whole world changes. As her sympathy for the town’s mill workers grows, her sense of social injustice piques and she passionately fights their corner. However, just as she disputes the mill owner, John Thornton’s treatment of his workers, she cannot deny her growing attraction to him. Highlighting the changing landscape of nineteenth-century Britain and championing the role of women in Victorian society, Gaskell brilliantly captures the lives of ordinary people through one of her strongest female characters in literature.

North and South (Collins Classics)

British & Irish

William Collins

Mary Barton is the pretty daughter of a factory worker who finds herself dreaming of a better life when the mill-owner’s charming son, Henry, starts to court her. She rejects her childhood friend Jem’s affections in the hope of marrying Henry and escaping from the hard and bitter life that is the fate of the workers, who are resentfully dependent on the callous mill-owners for their livelihoods. But when Henry is shot dead in the street Jem becomes the prime suspect and Mary finds her loyalties tested to the limit.

Mary Barton (Vintage Classics)

Genre Fiction

Vintage Classics

Milton is a sooty, noisy northern town centred around the cotton mills that employ most of its inhabitants. Arriving from a rural idyll in the south, Margaret Hale is initially shocked by the social unrest and poverty she finds in her new hometown. However, as she begins to befriend her neighbors, and her stormy relationship with the mill-owner John Thornton develops, she starts to see Milton in a different light.

North and South (Vintage Classics)

Contemporary

Three of Elizabeth Gaskell’s best-loved novels— Cranford, Mr Harrison's Confessions, and My Lady Ludlow—are combined in this witty and poignant look at the market town of Cranford. The railway is pushing its way relentlessly towards the village from Manchester, bringing fears of migrant workers and the breakdown of law and order. The arrival of handsome young Doctor Harrison causes yet further agitation, not just because of his revolutionary methods, but also because of his effect on the hearts of the village’s ladies. Meanwhile Miss Matty Jenkyns nurses her own heart following her forced abandonment of the man she loved since she was a young girl.

The Cranford Chronicles (Vintage Classics)

Elizabeth Gaskell’s last novel, a tender story of parents, children and step-children, mistakes, and secrets, is considered her masterpiece Set in the watchful, gossiping society of Hollingford, this warm tale of love and longing centers on the story of youthful Molly Gibson, the spirited, loyal daughter of the local doctor. Their peaceful, close-knit home is turned upside down when he decides to remarry. While Molly struggles to adjust to her snobbish stepmother, she forms a close relationship with her glamorous new stepsister Cynthia. The strength of this friendship is soon tested as their lives become entwined with Squire Hamley and his two sons. Far more than a nostalgic evocation of village life, this novel offers an ironic critique of mid-Victorian society.

Wives and Daughters (Vintage Classics)

The heroine of Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel passes from childhood to maturity in a process that, though often painful for her, is sharply and humorously observed. Set in the early 19th century, this novel is a subtle representation of historical change explored in human terms.

Wives And Daughters Tie In

Penguin Uk

Wives and Daughters

Literary

Penguin Classics

Set in Manchester in the 1840s, Mary Barton depicts the effects of economic and physical hardship upon the city's working-class community. Paralleling the novel's treatment of the relationship between masters and men, the suffering of the poor, and the workmen's angry response, is the story of Mary herself--a factory-worker's daughter who attracts the attentions of the mill-owner's son, who becomes caught up in the violence of class conflict when a brutal murder forces her to confront her true feelings and allegiances. This new edition reproduces the last edition of the novel supervised by Gaskell. The introduction provides historical and biographical context to the novel, a survey of critical responses to Mary Barton, and argues that Gaskell was chiefly concerned with the importance of communication as a means of healing breaches between people. In addition, the book contains an up-to-date critical biography, revised notes and appendixes that include Gaskell's rough draft and outline of the novel's conclusion.

Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life

540p paperback, spine a little creased, very good

North and South

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Books by GASKELL, Elizabeth