Description: These two diaries, by the nineteenth-century novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and her cousin Sophia Holland, provide us with uniquely personal and revealing accounts of Victorian womanhood and motherhood. They record the first few years of life of Marianne (Elizabeth Gaskell's daughter) and Edward Thurstan (Sophia's son). This is the first critical edition of the Gaskell diary, previously published in a limited edition of only fifty copies in 1923, and the first ever publication of the Holland diary. As a piece of social history, these diaries document the challenges, dilemmas and rewards of Victorian parenthood. As a piece of literature, there is no doubt that, in cultivating the powers of observation to be found in her diary, Elizabeth was laying the foundations for the wider social vision to be found in her novels.

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