“Mrs Gaskell was indeed a born story-teller, charged through and through with the story-teller’s peculiar element, a something which may be called suppressed gipsiness, a restless instinct which impelled her to be constantly making trial in imagination of various modes of life. Her imagination was perpetually busy with the vicissitudes which days and years brought round to others; she entered into their lives, laughed with them, wept with them, speculated on the cardinal incidents and circumstances, the good qualities and the ‘vicious moles of nature,’ which had made them what they were, schemed how they might have been different, and lived through the windings and turnings of their destinies, the excitement of looking forward to the unknown.…

“‘Sir,’ she seems to say to the nature-worshipper, ‘let us take a peep into some English household. Let us watch its inmates in comfort and in distress, I will tell you their history. You shall see how a Lancashire mechanic entertains his friends, how a country doctor gets on with his neighbours, how a coquettish farmer’s daughter behaves to her lovers. I have no strange experiences to reveal to you, only the life that lies at your doors; but I will show you its tragedies and its comedies. I will describe the characters of your countrymen to you, and I will tell you things about them that will interest you, some things that will make you weep and many that will make you smile.’” (Fortnightly Review, 1878.)

Dr. A. W. Ward

“The ‘century of praise’ which it would not be difficult to compose from the tributes, public and private, paid to the genius of Mrs. Gaskell by eminent men and women of her own generation, need hardly be invoked by its successors, to whom her writings still speak. Such a list would include, among other eulogies, those of Carlyle and Ruskin, of Dickens, who called her his ‘Scheherazade,’ and of Thackeray, of Charles Kingsley and of Matthew Arnold, of whom his sister, the late Mrs. W. E. Forster, drew a picture in his own happy manner, ‘stretched at full length on a sofa reading a Christmas tale of Mrs. Gaskell, which moves him to tears, and the tears to complacent admiration of his own sensibility.’ Lord Houghton, John Forster, George Henry Lewes, Tom Taylor, were among her declared admirers; to whom should be added among statesmen, Cobden and the late Duke of Argyll. Among Mrs. Gaskell’s female fellow-writers, Charlotte BrontË, and George Eliot, Harriet Martineau and Mrs. Beecher Stowe (facies non omnibus una) were at least alike to each other in their warm admiration of her. To these names should be added that of one whose praise came near home to Mrs. Gaskell’s heart—Mrs. Stanley, the mother of Dean Stanley. Among French lovers of her genius AmpÈre has already been mentioned, and with him should be named Guizot and Jules Simon.” (Introduction to Mary Barton, Knutsford Edition, 1906.)

Susanna Winkworth

“When we first knew Mrs. Gaskell she had not yet become celebrated, but from the earliest days of our intercourse with her we were struck with her genius, and used to say to each other that we were sure she could write books, or do anything else in the world that she liked. And the more we knew of her, the more we admired her. She was a noble-looking woman, with a queenly presence, and her high, broad, serene brow and finely-cut, mobile features, were lighted up by a constantly varying play of expression as she poured forth her wonderful talk. It was like the gleaming ripple and rush of a clear, deep stream in sunshine. Though one of the most brilliant persons I ever saw, she had none of the restlessness and eagerness that spoils so much of our conversation nowadays. There was no hurry or high pressure about her, but she seemed always surrounded by an atmosphere of ease, leisure, and playful geniality, that drew out the best side of everyone who was in her company.

“When you were with her, you felt as if you had twice the life in you that you had at ordinary times. All her great intellectual gifts—her quick, keen observation, her marvellous memory, her wealth of imaginative power, her rare felicity of instinct, her graceful and racy humour—were so warmed and brightened by sympathy and feeling, that while actually with her, you were less conscious of her power than of her charm.

“No one ever came near her in the gift of telling a story. In her hands the simplest incident—a meeting in the street, a talk with a factory-girl, a country walk, an old family history—became picturesque and vivid and interesting. Her fun, her pathos, her graphic touches, her sympathetic insight were inimitable.” (Memorials of two sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth, 1908.)

Thomas Seccombe

“Her novels are perenially fresh. They do not fatigue, or sear, or narcotise. We return to them with an unfading and constant delight. Her books engender a feeling of gratitude towards the writer along with a strong sentimental regret—regret that a life so happy, so sympathetic, so well balanced, and, in short so beautiful, could not have been prolonged, that her vivid mind and pen should not have irradiated our particular generation.

“Could you imagine England personified as a sentient and intelligent being, on the death of Elizabeth Gaskell, as on the death of Charles Lamb or Walter Scott, you would expect her to draw a long sigh as one feeling sensibly poorer for a loss that never could be repaired. You may think this to be a deliberate exaggeration, but it certainly is not. So far as artistic perfection is attainable in such a formless and chaotic thing as the modern novel, it is my deliberate belief that Mrs. Gaskell has no absolute rival in the measure of complete success which she was enabled to achieve.…

“If you ask for the normal type of English novel in the highest degree of perfection to which it ever attained, I should certainly be inclined to say take Mary Barton, North and South, Sylvia’s Lovers, and Wives and Daughters. Not one of them altogether or entirely attained to the perfection of which Mrs. Gaskell herself was capable. But they fully and adequately reveal her power and likewise her intention of subordinating herself in some degree to a form of the potentialities and limitations of which alike, it seems to me, she had an intuition surpassing the utmost efforts of any of her greater contemporaries.” (Introduction to Sylvia’s Lovers, 1910.)

Lady Ritchie

“Mrs. Gaskell put herself into her stories; her emotions, her amusements all poured out from a full heart, and she retold the experience of her own loyal work among the poor, of her playtime among the well-to-do. And as she knew more and more she told better and better what she had lived through. She told the story of those she had known, of those she had loved—so, at least, it seems to some readers, coming after long years and re-reading more critically, perhaps, with new admiration. Another fact about her is that she faced the many hard problems of her life’s experience—faced them boldly, and set the example of writing to the point. It has been followed by how many with half her knowledge and insight, and without her generous purpose, taking grim subjects for art’s sake rather than for humanity’s sake, as she did.” (Blackstick Papers, 1908.)

Frederick Greenwood

“The kindly spirit which thinks no ill looks out of her pages irradiate; and while we read them, we breathe the purer intelligence that prefers to deal with emotions and passions which have a living root in minds within the pale of salvation, and not with those that rot without it. This spirit is more especially declared in Cousin Phillis and Wives and Daughters—their author’s latest works; they seem to show that for her the end of life was not descent among the clods of the valley, but ascent into the purer air of the heaven-aspiring hills.

“We are saying nothing of the merely intellectual qualities displayed in these later works. Twenty years to come, that may be thought the more important question of the two; in the presence of her grave we cannot think so; but it is true, all the same, that as mere works of art and observation, these later novels of Mrs. Gaskell’s are among the finest of our time. There is a scene in Cousin Phillis—where Holman, making hay with his men, ends the day with a psalm—which is not excelled as a picture in all modern fiction; and the same may be said of that chapter of this last story in which Roger smokes a pipe with the Squire after the quarrel with Osborne. There is little in either of these scenes, or in a score of others which succeed each other like gems in a cabinet, which the ordinary novel-maker could ‘seize.’ There is no ‘material’ for him in half a dozen farming men singing hymns in a field, or a discontented old gentleman smoking tobacco with his son; still less could he avail himself of the miseries of a little girl sent to be happy in a fine house full of fine people; but it is just in such things as these that true genius appears brightest and most unapproachable.” (Cornhill Magazine, 1865.)

Miss Catherine J. Hamilton

“For purity of tone, earnestness of spirit, depth of pathos, and lightness of touch, Mrs. Gaskell has not left her superior in fiction.

“One who knew her said: ‘She was what her books show her to have been, a wise, good woman.’

“She was even more than wise or good, she had that true poetic feeling which exalts whatever it touches, and makes nothing common or unclean. She had that clear insight which sees all and believes in the best.” (Women Writers, Second Series.)

Richard D. Graham

“Mrs. Gaskell through all the toils and excitements of authorship remained a true woman in the sweetest and worthiest meaning of the name. In all the ordinary relations of life she was admirable, neglecting no social or domestic duty, shrinking from every attempt to lionise her, and charming no less by her personal attractions and the grace of her manner, than by the sweetness of her disposition.” (The Masters of Victorian Literature.)

Edna Lyall

“Of all the novelists of Queen Victoria’s reign there is not one to whom the present writer turns with such a sense of love and gratitude as to Mrs. Gaskell. This feeling is undoubtedly shared by thousands of men and women, for about all the novels there is that wonderful sense of sympathy, that broad human interest which appeals to readers of every description.”

(Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign.)

G. Barnett Smith

“We were struck in reading her various volumes with this fact—that there is really less in them than there is in most other authors which she herself could wish to be altered. In fact, there is no purer author in modern times. And what has she lost by being pure? Has she failed to give a fair representation of any class of human beings whom she professes to depict? Not one; and her work stands now as an excellent model for those who would avoid the tendencies of the sensuous school, and would seek another basis upon which to acquire a reputation which should have some chances of durability. The author of Wives and Daughters will never cease to hold a high place in our regard. Could she do so we should despair for the future of fiction in England. Hers was one of those spirits which led the way to a purer day.” (Cornhill Magazine, February, 1874.)

Clement K. Shorter

“Mrs. Gaskell as an artist has clearly used other experiences than those that Knutsford offered, and, transmuting all through her kindly and generous nature, has given us the delightful pure idyll (Cranford) that we know, the most tenderly humorous book that our literature has seen since Goldsmith wrote. One of the great distinctions of Mrs. Gaskell is in the kindliness of her humour; she is, strange to say, the only woman novelist who is entirely kindly, benevolently humorous.… This benevolent humour of Mrs. Gaskell is to be found in all her books, and it is to be found above all in Cranford.” (Introduction to Cranford. The World’s Classics, 1906.)