Elizabeth Gaskell was an acclaimed and prominent Victorian novelist, and a contemporary and friend of Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, among others. Her writings reflect both her happy upbringing in the Cheshire countryside and her concern for the privations of the working classes of Manchester, where she spent most of her adult life. Among her most famous works are the novels Mary Barton and North and South, and her controversial biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë.