Amazon.com description: Product Description: Since the publication of her first novel, "Mary Barton" in 1848, Elizabeth Gaskell's writing has provoked extensive and wide-ranging criticism. This collection brings together the varied critical responses to her work between 1848 and 1910, and includes comments from the letters and diaries of such contemporaries as Carlyle, Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot and Prosper Merime, as well as more formal reviews and notices. The pieces show that, whether tackling the problematic relations between "masters and men", or entering contemporary debate on the "fallen woman", Gaskell's novels caught the mood of her age and captured the imagination of her critics.