William Gaskell - Personal Life and Elizabeth Gaskell

Personal Life and Elizabeth Gaskell

Gaskell married Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson, daughter of the former Unitarian minister William Stevenson, in 1832. The couple had four surviving daughters.

Despite differences in personality, the couple seem to have had a strong relationship, although they frequently spent long periods apart, and Elizabeth Gaskell's biographer Jenny Uglow describes her as breathing more freely when William was away. Unfortunately, none of Elizabeth's many letters to him survive.

Gaskell is said to have encouraged his wife to write her first novel as a distraction from her grief at the death of their infant son from scarlet fever in 1845. Elizabeth Gaskell's industrial novels Mary Barton and North and South were directly inspired by her experiences as a minister's wife in the cotton-manufacturing city of Manchester. Gaskell always encouraged his wife's writing, advising her on dialect, editing her manuscripts and acting as her literary agent. He also supported her when some of her novels, particularly Mary Barton and Ruth, drew strong criticism for their radical views, as well as through the threatened law suits over her biography of Charlotte Brontë.

Elizabeth died suddenly in 1865. William Gaskell survived his wife by almost two decades, working full time until six months before his death, aided by his two unmarried daughters. He died of bronchitis in Manchester in 1884, and is buried beside Elizabeth at Brook Street Chapel, Knutsford.