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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent biography,
This review is from: Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (Paperback)
This is a wonderfully detailed, scholarly, and readable biography. A great place to start discovering Gaskell and her world. Gaskell is a gossipy, lively, endlessly engaging subject, and Uglow does her full justice.
'Remember, every little, leetle, particular about yourself, and your concerns, and gossipry, and scandal, are most welcome to me, but especially all that interests you, and Elizabeth personally, down to the uninteresting in general basons of tapioca you have at lunch...' - there's Gaskell in a nutshell, in a letter she wrote to her friend in 1831. Everything interests her, from tapioca to scandals, and Uglow shows how she turns all these details of everyday life into fiction; how her interest in the personal feeds into her novel-writing. What I found particularly engaging about this book was the way in which Uglow takes Gaskell's Unitarian faith seriously, and explains how important Unitarianism was to the nineteenth century. She deftly outlines Gaskell's religion, and her network of Unitarian friends and relatives, bringing out a broader historical context in an absorbing way. This is an excellent introduction to her works, but Uglow's scholarship means it is also a reliable source for those wanting to take their studies further.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories,
By
This review is from: Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (Paperback)
Jenny Uglow is a superb writer with a rare feeling for capturing the times she writes about and bringing the reader into them. I love and admire the work of Mrs. Gaskell and this biography adds greatly to my understanding of her.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing,
By Margaret Rolfe (Curtin, A.C.T. Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (Paperback)
I so looked forward to this book as I am a fan of Elizabeth Gaskell's books and was very curious to know more about a writer that successfully combined motherhood and a writing career at a time when this was most unusual. But I am disappointed . The paperback edition I got has very small type and is so densely bound that it is hard to read the text in the crack. This made reading difficult and unpleasant. Perhaps the hardback avoided this problem, which is no solace to me after purchasing the paperback. I also found that although the writer really knows what she is talking about and has done amazing research, it was difficult to follow. A shorter, more concise book would have been better. A book more for academia than general reading - though I think good writing should be good for both.
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