Böcker av Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - It is a great thing for a lad when he is first turned into the independence of lodgings. I do not think I ever was so satisfied and proud in my life as when, at seventeen, I sate down in a little three-cornered room above a pastry-cook's shop in the county town of Eltham. My father had left me that afternoon, after delivering himself of a few plain precepts, strongly expressed, for my guidance in the new course of life on which I was entering. I was to be a clerk under the engineer who had undertaken to make the little branch line from Eltham to Hornby. My father had got me this situation, which was in a position rather above his own in life; or perhaps I should say, above the station in which he was born and bred; for he was raising himself every year in men's consideration and respect. He was a mechanic by trade, but he had some inventive genius, and a great deal of perseverance, and had devised several valuable improvements in railway machinery. He did not do this for profit, though, as was reasonable, what came in the natural course of things was acceptable; he worked out his ideas, because, as he said, 'until he could put them into shape, they plagued him by night and by day.' But this is enough about my dear father; it is a good thing for a country where there are many like him. He was a sturdy Independent by descent and conviction; and this it was, I believe, which made him place me in the lodgings at the pastry-cook's.

Originally published as a magazine serial and then printed in novel form in 1853, Cranford is a playful tour of a peculiar country town. From the stately, stern Miss Jenkyns to the timid Miss Betsy Barker and her flannel-wearing cow, the inhabitants are all acquainted, and all poised to overhear scandal.

Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte, the first of many biographies of the Brontes, helped to establish the family's public image as a dynasty characterised by literary genius and personal tragedy. Volume 1 covers Charlotte's life up until the publication of her poems under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1846.

These two diaries, by the nineteenth-century novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and her cousin Sophia Holland, provide us with uniquely personal and revealing accounts of Victorian womanhood and motherhood.

An omnibus edition that includes Elizabeth Gaskell's classic novel "Cranford", which is a comic portrait of the lives of Cranford's genteel female inhabitants, as well as a novella and a short story. It presents poignant portraits of early Victorian country village life.