Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was an English novelist and biographer, married to a Unitarian minister in Manchester, where the conditions of the industrial poor became the subject of her first novel, Mary Barton. She wrote both social-problem fiction, including North and South, and the gentler comedy of Cranford (1853). Her Life of Charlotte Brontë, published two years after her friend's death, remains one of the nineteenth century's most influential literary biographies.