Heather Glen Knihy

This representative selection includes five tales of very different kinds written in the 1850s and the longer Cousin Phillis. Immensely readable and sophisticated works of art, they show Gaskell's mastery of the genre, in an edition that celebrates her achievements in shorter fiction and the context in which they first appeared.

Overlooked or dismissed by critics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jane Eyre first began to attract serious critical attention in the 1970s as New Critical, formalist and feminist critics began to re-evaluate Charlotte Bronte's achievement.