Elizabeth Gaskell, alone among the great women Victorian writers, combined her art with the determined respectability that prompts her readers even today to think of her as Mrs. Gaskell. In her writing she was a radical: her novels shocked her readers with their portrayals of industrial England with its class wars and fallen women; and her biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë was revolutionary in introducing its audience to the injustices suffered by a women writer. That radicalism had its roots in her thoroughly conventional domestic life as a devoted mother and Unitarian minister's wife, roles which held places in her life at least as important to her as those of write rand activist. Using Gaskell's own extensive correspondence to introduce her to us in her own words, Jenny Uglow's warmly affectionate biography is a unique portrait of a Victorian woman's world, filled with storytelling, life, and work. -- From publisher's description.