Mary Barton (Everyman's Library Classics)

Gaskell, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857151852 ISBN 13: 9781857151855

Publisher: Everyman, 1994

Published in 1848, MARY BARTON was the first novel of Elizabeth Gaskell, later to become celebrated as the author of CRANFORD, MARY BARTON - a better book than CRANFORD - was written after she has married a Manchester clergyman, and it combines a typically sturdy romantic plot with striking descriptions of working people and their lives as she had encountered them in northern mills. Despite this grim setting, the book has all this author's well-known charm and considerable power to involve the reader in the lives of her characters. More accessible than George Eliot, less frenzied than Charlotte Bronte, Mrs Gaskell is a novelist whose wit, human warmth and sharp eye for detail bring ordinary experience to vivid life.

Review:

This is Elizabeth Gaskell at her best, and Shirley Foster's edition is both sagacious and formally accurate. The appendices are invaluable and the explanatory notes are relevant without being obtrusive. A must for readers of Mary Barton. (Dr. Antonio Ballesteros-González, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha)

From the Publisher:

The Broadview Editions series is an effort to represent the ever-changing canon of literature in English by bringing together texts long regarded as classics with valuable, lesser-known literature. Newly type-set and produced on high-quality paper in trade paperback format, the Broadview Editions series is a delight to handle as well as to read.

Each volume includes a full introduction, chronology, bibliography, and explanatory notes along with a variety of documents from the period, giving readers a rich sense of the world from which the work emerged.