The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell

The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell brings together twenty-five chapters by emerging and established scholars that address Gaskell’s works, networks, contexts, and legacies. Contributors draw on a range of approaches including ecocriticism, queer theory, and studies in emotion. Particular attention is paid to the intersections between race, class, gender and religion in Gaskell’s fiction, as well as to the ongoing afterlife of her work in fiction, film, web-series, and fanfiction.

The Companion is divided into three parts. The first, ‘Texts’, showcases innovative readings of individual works, including well-known and much-studied novels, the biography of Charlotte Brontë, and less-familiar texts such as shorter tales, non-fiction pieces, and letters. The second part, ‘Themes’, features chapters that connect Gaskell’s novels, short fiction, journalism, and life writing in various combinations to present cutting-edge perspectives on the writer’s oeuvre in relation to many cultural and literary concerns including the built environment, material and visual culture, abolition, and the rituals of mourning. The final part, ‘Legacies’, considers the reception of Gaskell’s writings from the late nineteenth century to the present day, addressing their adaptation into multiple forms and media.

With its international and comprehensive scope, this volume offers an invaluable resource which attests that Gaskell continues to be a writer worthy of substantial critical attention and signals new directions in Gaskell studies and Victorian studies more widely.

Elizabeth Ludlow is Associate Professor of Literature and Religion at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. She is the author of Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints (2014) and Prayer and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (2025), the editor of The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020), and co-editor, with Koenraad Claes, of The Nineteenth-Century Present: Literature, Print Culture and Historicity (2025). She has published work on the literary and artistic legacy of St Monica of Hippo and on authors including Elizabeth Gaskell, Josephine Butler, George Eliot, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Rebecca Styler is Associate Professor of English at the University of Lincoln, UK. She is author of Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (2010) and The Maternal Image of God in Victorian Literature (2024). She is editor of Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society: Traditions (2020), and is co-editor of the Gaskell Journal. She has published chapters and articles on religious innovations in nineteenth-century literature by women including Elizabeth Gaskell, Josephine Butler, and Charlotte Brontë, and by authors of utopian texts, ghost stories, and spiritual auto/biography.