With the advent of feminist criticism in the 1970s, questions of class were joined by questions of gender. It was not until the 1950s, when Marxist literary critics recognized the affective power of her portrayal of working-class poverty in her social-problem novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), that Gaskell’s stock once more began to rise. Yet, it was not always so: in the early part of the 20th century, her reputation was much diminished, arguably reaching its nadir when she was patronizingly categorized as a writer of merely feminine charm by Lord David Cecil in 1934. Her literary stature at the start of the 21st century is at least as high: she is known as a formally versatile canonical novelist, a vivacious correspondent, a delicate miniaturist as a teller of short stories, and the author of a groundbreaking biography in The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). 1865) was an eminent and sometimes controversial writer. In her own lifetime, Elizabeth Gaskell (b.
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