Mrs Gaskell

If you are a reasonably committed Marxist or at least Marxist scholar as I was as a grad student, you can only find Mrs G's writing entirely ghastly. Syrupy and simplistic, naiively optimistic, as literature it is gawdblimey awful; as a historical document of Victorian living some 15 years after the major reform act, it is reasonable.

[SteveH]

I'm politically left, though not a Marxist, and find EG's proposed solutions to the social problems she describes completely naive, but at least she brought the problems to people's attention. She meant well, and I like her books a lot. She could be over-sentimental, but she was a middle-class mid-Victorian! She was never nearly as sickeningly sentimental as Dickens at his worst, although I love Dickens, for all his faults, as well.