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Elizabeth Gaskell, radical gentlewoman

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From: The Boston Globe
Date: 19931011
Author:Michael Kenney, Globe Staff

ELIZABETH GASKELL

A Habit of Stories

By Jenny Uglow

Farrar Straus & Giroux, 690 pp., illustrated, $35

A powerful episode in Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel, "Mary Barton," forces the question of how that Victorian gentlewoman -- invariably referred to as "Mrs. Gaskell" -- became so radicalized as to be able to write with such bitter passion and keen political sense of the "two Englands," North and South, rich and poor, that had been created by the Industrial Revolution.

It is the episode in which Mary's mill-worker father is called out one night to help the family of a fellow ...

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