Chapter VI

I shall pass the catalogue of these writings very quickly in review. The authoress of _Mary Barton_ was hailed at that time, when novels were yet few and even poetry but beginning to recover its strength, by great men and by Dickens especially, who engaged her pen for the first number of his serial adventure, _Household Words_. In 1853 appeared her second important novel, _Ruth_ (which possibly influenced Dickens’ own _Hard Times_, published a year later). Then in June, 1853, came _Cranford_, made into a book from papers contributed to _Household Words_ between December, 1851, and May, 1853. _North and South_ ran in _Household Words_ from September, 1854, to January, 1855, and appeared as a book, with some slight alterations, in that year. In that year also (on March 31st) Charlotte Brontë died and Mrs. Gaskell consented, at the old father’s urgent request, to write the Biography. She gave herself up to the work and finished it in the spring of 1857. The strictures on it--truth, as Milton says, never comes into the world but as a bastard--broke her spirit for a while for all but occasional writing: and then came the cotton famine, of which I have spoken, to tax all her energies. But after the stress of this they revived. In 1863 appeared _Sylvia’s Lovers_, in 1863–4 _Cousin Phillis_ in the pages of the _Cornhill Magazine_. In this magazine (August, 1864–January, 1866) followed her last story, _Wives and Daughters_, published soon after in that year as an unfinished work. So you see the whole tale of it lies within the central years of the last century, beginning with _Mary Barton_ in 1848 and ending sharply just eighteen years after.