Elizabeth Gaskell

Gaskell married a Unitarian minister and settled in industrial Manchester, where the poverty and unrest she witnessed around her became the material for her 'Condition of England' fiction. She began writing Mary Barton (1848), her debut, partly as a way through grief after the death of her infant son; it was published anonymously and became a sensation for its sympathetic portrait of striking mill workers.

North and South (1855) balanced that sympathy against the mill owners' own case, refusing easy villains on either side. She was also Charlotte Brontë's close friend and first biographer; her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) was so frank about the Brontë family's suffering that it provoked libel threats and had to be revised.

Gaskell died suddenly of a heart attack in 1865, mid-conversation, while house-hunting for her daughters.