The Cranford Chronicles

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.‘We're their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds…’Set in the industrial unrest of 1840s Manchester, Mary Barton is a factory-worker's daughter living a working-class life in Victorian England. She soon attracts the attentions of the mill-owner's son, Harry Carson, and in the hope that marrying him will...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.‘“I'll not listen to reason,” she said, now in full possession of her voice, which had been rather choked with sobbing. «Reason always means what someone else has got to say.»’First published in serial format in a magazine, Gaskell’s Cranford is a delightfully light-hearted series of stories about early Victorian life in a country village.Following the lives of two spinster sisters, Miss Matty and Miss Deborah as...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.‘But the cloud never comes in that quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.’When Margaret Hale is uprooted from Hampshire and moves to the industrial town of Milton in the North of England, her whole world changes. As her sympathy for the town’s mill workers grows, her sense of social injustice piques and she passionately fights their corner. However, just as she disputes the mill owner, John Thornton’s...

This tender story of parents, children and step-children, mistakes and secrets was Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel and is considered her masterpiece. Set in the watchful society of Hollingford, this is a warm tale of love and longing. Molly Gibson is the spirited, loyal daughter of the local doctor. Their peaceful close-knit home is turned upside down when Molly's father decides to remarry. Whilst Molly struggles to adjust to her snobbish stepmother, she forms a close relationship...

Mary Barton, the daughter of disillusioned trade unionist, rejects her working-class lover Jem Wilson in the hope of marrying Henry Carson, the mill owner's son, and making a better life for herself and her father. But when Henry is shot down in the street and Jem becomes the main suspect, Mary finds herself painfully torn between the two men. Through Mary's dilemma, and the moving portrayal of her father, the embittered and courageous activist John Barton, Mary Barton (1848) powerfully...

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Sylvia's Lovers is set in the period of French Revolutionary Wars, in the remote whaling-port of Monkshaven where the sea dominates the lives of the inhabitants. This is a story of a young woman caught between the attractions of two very different men. One of them is a whaling harpooner named Charley Kinraid, whose charm and vivacity have captured the heart of Sylvia Robson. However, Sylvia's devoted cousin,...