A young woman jilted by her ex-fiancé is given a second shot at love when her meddling relatives contrive ways to pair her up with her handsome neighbor in this laugh-out-loud contemporary romance novella that will sweep you off your feet.Sophie has poured her whole heart into her dream: a little beach café to keep her busy and thousands of miles away from her heartbreak. When her younger sister and cousin visit for the summer, she doesn't expect them to cause so m...

A fifteen-year-old dressmaker's apprentice is seduced and abandoned, and a dissenting minister and his sister take her in and pass her off as a widow — a lie that must eventually be paid for by someone. Gaskell, a Manchester minister's wife, published this in 1853; readers burned it, two men in her husband's congregation forbade their wives to read it, and she wrote that she felt like St Sebastian. It is the first English novel to treat a fallen woman as a person.

Gaskell off duty: a traveller in France who blunders into a château where the guests are Puss in Boots, Bluebeard and the Sleeping Beauty, grown old; a curse on a Welsh house; a nurse's story with a child at the window in the snow. She was a Manchester minister's wife who wrote about factory poverty, and these strange tales, written for Dickens's magazine, are her other hand entirely.

A country attorney kills a man in his own office in a moment of rage, and his clerk helps him bury the body — after which the daughter of the house must live thirty years with what she saw. Gaskell was a Manchester minister's wife; she wrote this for Dickens's magazine, and it is her only crime story — the interest is entirely in what a secret does to a family that keeps it.

Whitby in the 1790s, a whaling town: the press gang takes men off the ships as they come in, a girl loves a specksioneer, and a shopman who loves her hears something he chooses not to repeat. Gaskell, a Manchester minister's wife, called this the saddest story she ever wrote; she researched the Whitby press-gang riots on the spot, and the lie at the centre is told in half a sentence, by a decent man.

Lady Ludlow will not have the village children taught to read, because she once knew what a written word did in France; around her, an estate is changing hands and manners, and she is the last person who cannot see it. Gaskell, a Manchester minister's wife, wrote this in 1858; the tale within the tale — the French Terror — is the reason for everything the old woman believes, and it lands like a shot.

Experience fifteen complete classics by Jane Austen, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and Louisa May Alcott. From Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights, North and South and Little Women, this collection celebrates unforgettable heroines and extraordinary literary voices. The novels flow from wit and social observation to passion, independence and family life. Clear book dividers and a detailed table of contents make this substantial library inviting and ...

“Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used--not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.”When her clergyman father decides to leave the Church, Margaret Hale is whisked away from her tranquil life in the rural south and brought to the gritty industrial town of Milton-Northern. Befriending the local union representative, the spirited Margaret soon learns about the hardships suf...

Fans of social realism will appreciate the surprisingly nuanced and multi-faceted perspective on Victorian era morals and mores offered in Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell's sweeping novel Ruth. The story follows the fortune of Ruth, an orphan who is tricked into an intimate relationship with an aristocrat who later abandons her when she is pregnant with his child. Ruth, distraught, struggles with the social strictures that paint her as an irredeemable sinner. Can she and her child survive? Read...

This book contains several HTML tables of contents.The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.Here you will find the complete novels of Elizabeth Gaskell in the chronological order of their original publication.

In a bid to help her pregnant older sister pay for bills, a young woman must convince the owner of a secondhand bookshop to sell his property so she can get a commission, only to discover her childhood crush working behind the counter, asking her to help save his home.When Nell's brother-in-law disappears, leaving her pregnant sister buried in bills, Nell takes on a commission that could fix everything. All she needs to do is convince the eccentric owner of a belov...

Cranford was first serialized in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words between 1851 and 1853. The structureless nature of the stories, and the fact that Gaskell was busy writing her novel Ruth at the time the Cranford shorts were being published, suggests that she didn't initially plan for Cranford to be a cohesive novel.The short vignettes follow the activities of the society in the fictional small English country town of Cranford. ...