This absorbing study of Elizabeth Gaskell's early life up to her marriage in 1832, is based almost entirely on new evidence, marriage settlements, property transfers, wills, record office documents, letters, journals and private papers, John Chapple has recreated the background of one of the nineteenth century's greatest novelists. The widely differing lives of her father, brother and the aunt who raised her are illuminated at length from original documents. Chapple has discovered a number of letters written by close relations that shed new light on her upbringing, and he analyses three hitherto unknown travel journals by her Knutsford cousins which prove that she grew up in a literary milieu. The careers of the more important figures in her early life have been re-traced: the Turners of Newcastle, the Robberds of Manchester and the Byerley sisters. The relationship with Katharine Thomson (nee Byerley), herself a prolific novelist, has been fleshed out to reveal how she provided a model of literary production during the younger writer's teens and early twenties.