Elizabeth Gaskell is a writer worth knowing. Gaskell, born in 1810 was a friend of both Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte. She was employed by Dickens and  she wrote "The Life of Charlotte Brontë" (1857) after Bronte's death.   Along with the text Lizzy Leigh(1850), some of her famous works include "North and South"(1855)," Mary Barton" (1848),and "Cranford"(1853). She is also named as a trailblazer of female supernatural writers  in  “Monster, she wrote '' (2019). Though she is more known for her radical politics, especially in her views on industrialization, poverty, and the rights of women. In some of her work, we see a conscious and oftentimes sympathetic subversion of the fallen woman trope. The typical narrative regarding a fallen woman, is that an innocent woman is led astray and becomes a prostitute and dies alone. She is seen as tragic, but ultimately unredeemable. Gaskell goes against this, offering some repentance to these women such as in Lizzy Leigh(1850) where a mother actively attempts to recover her lost daughter. 

 “Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 5 Mar. 2024, www.britannica.com/biography/Elizabeth-Cleghorn-Gaskell. 

The Gaskell Society,  5 aug, 2022 gaskellsociety.co.uk/.