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Graham Handley, An Elizabeth Gaskell Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. xxi+252. Hardback £58.00, ISBN 1-4039-0213-5.
This new volume in Palgrave Macmillan's 'Author Chronologies' series has been prepared by Graham Handley, a long-standing member of the Gaskell Society and distinguished scholar of Victorian fiction. He has generously dedicated it to the Society, and to Frances Twinn (who will take over the editorship of The Gaskell Society Journal after this issue).
The volume is one in a series whose format involves providing as close as possible a day-by-day account of the life of the author involved. Compiled in the form of an extended diary it records the facts of the life, without imposing the structures and interpretations of a conventional biography. In Gaskell's case Dr Handley has availed himself of a very full range of sources, as outlined in his Introduction. Most prominent amongst these, of course, are the two volumes of Gaskell's letters (1966, 2000). For the early years he is indebted to John Chapple's book on the subject, and he draws on the work of Gaskell biographers past and present, up...