Published by Primary Source Microfilm

From the John Rylands University Library, Manchester, England

Previous title: Elizabeth Gaskell and Nineteenth Century Literature

Scholars of 19th-century literature, particularly those studying the "social novels" of the 1840s, will consider this collection to be an essential resource. The collection includes:

• Wives and Daughters, the only novel by Elizabeth Gaskell known to have survived in manuscript
• The Life of Charlotte Brontë, the original manuscript of Gaskell's controversial critical biography of her friend, containing supposedly libelous passages subsequently withdrawn at the time of publication in 1857. Adding interest to this manuscript is the correspondence with Patrick and Charlotte Brontë on the subject of the biography

Letters and papers concerning Gaskell's own upbringing and family life populate the collections, as well as correspondence with friends and contemporaries including:

• Matthew Arnold
• John Bright
• George Eliot
• Mary Howitt
• Charles Kingsley
• Florence Nightingale
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti
• John Ruskin
• William Wordsworth

Other 19th-century literary manuscripts from the holdings of the John Rylands University Library, which fit well with the Gaskell papers, are included. Among them are papers of Mary Russell Mitford (with much on Our Village) and Mary Jewsbury; the manuscript of Sisters by George Crabbe; a valuable collection of materials on Charles Dickens, including an autograph manuscript of one of his speeches; and the first edition of Dickens' The Village Coquettes: A Comic Opera.

13 reels