Mary Barton is beautiful but has been born poor. Her father fights for the rights of his fellow workers, but Mary wants to make a better life for them both. She rashly decides to reject her lover Jem, a struggling engineer, in the hope of marrying the rich mill-owner's son Henry Carson and securing [...]

This is the "Penguin English Library" edition of "North and South" by Elizabeth Gaskell. 'How am I to dress up in my finery, and go off and away to smart parties, after the sorrow I have seen today?' Elizabeth Gaskell's compassionate, richly dramatic novel features one of the most original and fully[...]

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "Mary Barton" by Elizabeth Gaskell. "The rich know nothing of the trials of the poor; I say, if they don't know, they ought to know. We're their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to li[...]

'Even in the stillness of that dead-cold weather, I had heard no sound of little battering hands upon the window-glass...' A phantom child roams the Northumberland moors, while a host of fairytale characters gone to seed gather in the dark, dark woods in these two surprising tales of the uncanny fro[...]

Part of "Penguin's" beautiful hardback "Clothbound Classics" series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Gaskell's best known work is set in a small rural[...]

Mary Gaskell's North and South examines the nature of social authority and obedience and provides an insightful description of the role of middle class women in nineteenth century society. Through the story of Margaret Hale, a southerner who moves to the northern industrial town of Milton, Gaskell s[...]

'It is in every way worthy of what one great woman should have written of another.' Patrick Bronte Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) is a pioneering biography of one great Victorian woman novelist by another. Gaskell was a friend of Charlotte Bronte, and, having been invited t[...]

Set in a fictional Whitby at the turn of the eighteeenth century, Sylvia's Lovers (1863) is a compelling story of an ordinary girl's tragic passion for a man who disappears. This wide-ranging new edition includes freshly researched notes and considers the novel's debates with the legacy of the Bront[...]

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 fa[...]

Treasured household names, including Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Imelda Staunton and Julia McKenzie, brought Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford to life in one of the best-loved classic dramas of all time. This celebratory omnibus edition includes the classic novel of the same name, a comic portrait of the [...]