Gaskell, Elizabeth
Gaskell, Elizabeth (married name of Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson 1810–65)English novelist, short‐story writer and biographer of Charlotte Brontë. She was a keen storyteller and lover of ghost stories. Charles Dickens referred to her as his ‘dear Scheherazade’, and many of her short stories were published in his magazines Household Words and All the Year Round. Her fairy‐tale‐inspired short stories include ‘Curious if True’ (1860), in which an Englishman tracing his ancestry in France comes across a château full of strangely familiar guests, each of whom appears to be a realistic version of a fairy‐tale character. Of her novels, Wives and Daughters (1864–6), left unfinished at her death, is most explicit in its use of fairy tales.
Stephen Benson
[The entire page is 135 words long]
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