Cousin Phillis

Description

A novel in four sections, although the fifth and sixth section were devised. The story tells of Paul Manning, a young man, who lives in the country and make friends with his mother’s family and his cousin Phillis Holman, who is baffled by her own disposition at the brink of adulthood.

Many reviewers concur that Cousin Phillis is Elizabeth’s highest accomplishment in the short book. The novel is straightforward, its merits are in the mode of its elaboration and narration. Cousin Phillis is also acknowledged as an appropriate prelude for Elizabeth’s last and highly praised novel, Wives and Daughters, which scuttled in Cornhill Magazine from August 1864 to January 1866.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was a novelist and short fiction writer. Her works show a full illustration of the lives of several echelons of Victorian social order, such as the most destitute, and are of attention to social historians and admirers of literature. Her first story is Mary Barton. Her work on The Life of Charlotte Brontë was the first life account of Brontë. A few of Elizabeth’s most popular novels are Cranford, North and South, and Wives and Daughters.

She was born as Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson in Lindsey Row, Chelsea. She was the youngest of her eight siblings where she and her brother John outlived the early years. Her father, William Stevenson, a Unitarian from Berwick-upon-Tweed, was minister at Failsworth, Lancashire, but left his orders on honest grounds and lived in London in 1806 with the reason of traveling to India after he was designated as private secretary to the Earl of Lauderdale, who was to become Governor General of India. That appointment did not happen, though, and as an alternative, he was nominated Keeper of the Treasury Records. His wife, Elizabeth Holland, emanated from a family from the English Midlands that was related with other well known Unitarian families, such as the Wedgwoods, the Martineaus, the Turners and the Darwins.
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