“No one ever came near her in the gift of telling a story. In her hands the simplest incident—a meeting in the street, a talk with a factory-girl, a country walk, an old family history—became picturesque and vivid and interesting. Her fun, her pathos, her graphic touches, her sympathetic insight were inimitable.” (Memorials of two sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth, 1908.)
Thomas Seccombe
“Her novels are perenially fresh. They do not fatigue, or sear, or narcotise. We return to them with an unfading and constant delight. Her books engender a feeling of gratitude towards the writer along with a strong sentimental regret—regret that a life so happy, so sympathetic, so well balanced, and, in short so beautiful, could not have been prolonged, that her vivid mind and pen should not have irradiated our particular generation.
“Could you imagine England personified as a sentient and intelligent being, on the death of Elizabeth Gaskell, as on the death of Charles Lamb or Walter Scott, you would expect her to draw a long sigh as one feeling sensibly poorer for a loss that never could be repaired. You may think this to be a deliberate exaggeration, but it certainly is not. So far as artistic perfection is attainable in such a formless and chaotic thing as the modern novel, it is my deliberate belief that Mrs. Gaskell has no absolute rival in the measure of complete success which she was enabled to achieve.…
“If you ask for the normal type of English novel in the highest degree of perfection to which it ever attained, I should certainly be inclined to say take Mary Barton, North and South, Sylvia’s Lovers, and Wives and Daughters. Not one of them altogether or entirely attained to the perfection of which Mrs. Gaskell herself was capable. But they fully and adequately reveal her power and likewise her intention of subordinating herself in some degree to a form of the potentialities and limitations of which alike, it seems to me, she had an intuition surpassing the utmost efforts of any of her greater contemporaries.” (Introduction to Sylvia’s Lovers, 1910.)
Lady Ritchie
“Mrs. Gaskell put herself into her stories; her emotions, her amusements all poured out from a full heart, and she retold the experience of her own loyal work among the poor, of her playtime among the well-to-do. And as she knew more and more she told better and better what she had lived through. She told the story of those she had known, of those she had loved—so, at least, it seems to some readers, coming after long years and re-reading more critically, perhaps, with new admiration. Another fact about her is that she faced the many hard problems of her life’s experience—faced them boldly, and set the example of writing to the point. It has been followed by how many with half her knowledge and insight, and without her generous purpose, taking grim subjects for art’s sake rather than for humanity’s sake, as she did.” (Blackstick Papers, 1908.)
Frederick Greenwood
“The kindly spirit which thinks no ill looks out of her pages irradiate; and while we read them, we breathe the purer intelligence that prefers to deal with emotions and passions which have a living root in minds within the pale of salvation, and not with those that rot without it. This spirit is more especially declared in Cousin Phillis and Wives and Daughters—their author’s latest works; they seem to show that for her the end of life was not descent among the clods of the valley, but ascent into the purer air of the heaven-aspiring hills.
“We are saying nothing of the merely intellectual qualities displayed in these later works. Twenty years to come, that may be thought the more important question of the two; in the presence of her grave we cannot think so; but it is true, all the same, that as mere works of art and observation, these later novels of Mrs. Gaskell’s are among the finest of our time. There is a scene in Cousin Phillis—where Holman, making hay with his men, ends the day with a psalm—which is not excelled as a picture in all modern fiction; and the same may be said of that chapter of this last story in which Roger smokes a pipe with the Squire after the quarrel with Osborne. There is little in either of these scenes, or in a score of others which succeed each other like gems in a cabinet, which the ordinary novel-maker could ‘seize.’ There is no ‘material’ for him in half a dozen farming men singing hymns in a field, or a discontented old gentleman smoking tobacco with his son; still less could he avail himself of the miseries of a little girl sent to be happy in a fine house full of fine people; but it is just in such things as these that true genius appears brightest and most unapproachable.” (Cornhill Magazine, 1865.)