Elizabeth Gaskell: The Making of Cranford

As money from her writing increased, Plymouth Grove was gradually transformed, Chippendale for the drawing room, a new bedroom suite and richly patterned rugs and curtains. Again, like most Victorian women, Elizabeth’s cupboards were full of china, not only the china of her Wedgwood relatives but tea sets and dinner services from the other famous names of the day like Coalport and Minton.

Stories, novels, hundreds of letters flowed from her pen. She wrote most often in the dining room at Plymouth Grove, ‘scuttering my pencil away when anyone comes near.’ The room had three doors which meant constant interruptions from children, servants and the endless succession of family, friends and celebrities –Dickens and Charlotte Bronte among them- who came to call and to stay in Plymouth Grove’s seven bedrooms. William’s study door, by contrast, remained firmly closed to the demands of domesticity.

It was an exhausting life. Frequent journeys at home and abroad, the streams of visitors, charity work, deadlines, family demands, winter depressions and frequent ill health all took their toll. By 1864, her thoughts were turning more and more to the countryside of her early life. She was writing Wives and Daughters, again inspired by Knutsford, and was becoming increasingly determined to try to change things.  In 1865 she took a surprising decision. She would buy a house, secretly without William’s knowledge, in the south, far from the smoke of Manchester, where the family, and William, could live in country retirement.

It was an astonishing idea, not least because William would be likely to fight tooth and nail against leaving his beloved Manchester. But with characteristic willpower she went ahead, buying and furnishing unseen, a house called The Lawn in Holybourne, Hampshire. She organised the preparation of the house from a distance, employing charwomen, upholsterers, builders and decorators.

 It was there, on a secret visit with three of her daughters, and typically having left her Heal’s list in Manchester in her haste to escape, that she died suddenly on a Sunday afternoon at the early age of 55. The family had me t for tea in the drawing room at five o’clock. She was still speaking, when she suddenly fell forward, dead, into Meta’s arms.  

The last of a lifetime of journeys took her again to Knutsford, where she lies in a quiet grave at Brook Street Unitarian chapel, less than a mile from the town which she made immortal.