ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Gaskell was an inveterate letter writer. She wrote daily to her daughters when she was away from home, and also to her husband when they were apart, although few of her letters to him have survived. She was adamant that no biography should be written after her death, instructing her daughters to this effect. Several of the obituaries written in 1865 commented on how little was known of her private life, and so it was to remain. Clement K. Shorter was contracted to write the volume on Gaskell for the second series of John Morley's English Men of Letters in 1902, on the understanding that Meta Gaskell vetted what he had written. In her review of the Knutsford edition, the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie commented that Gaskell 'put herself into her stories; her emotions, her amusements all poured out from a full heart'.
