( Elizabeth Gaskell 1810–65)
an English writer of novels. Most of these are set in the north-west of England, including Cranford (1853), which is set in Knutsford, the town near Manchester where she lived, and Mary Barton (1848), which is about the social conditions of working-class people in Manchester. She also wrote a biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë , published in 1857.