For some critics Elizabeth Gaskell was a conventional, middle-class Victorian wife and mother who accepted the values of her world and who also happened to write books--a feminine dove among literary eagles Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, to borrow Lord David Cecil's suggestive phrase. These critics, whose views predominated from the waning years of the nineteenth century until the 1950s, tended to see Cranford (1853) as her most representative and important work. In her own time and for two decades after her death Gaskell was known mainly as the author of Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848), which achieved immediate success upon its publication. In the 1950s Marxist critics rediscovered this Gaskell, the social-problem novelist whose most characteristic work engages issues of industrialization, urbanization, class hostility, and both political and social change. She was seen by these critics as an incisive social critic who used fiction as...