More recently feminist critics have drawn attention to Gaskell's intense, ongoing interest in women's position in society, and especially in motherhood as both institution and practice. For this group of critics, who usually identify
Wives and Daughters: An Every Day Story (1866) as her greatest achievement, Gaskell was an unconventional, complicated person, a serious artist who strove to articulate in all of her writings what she understood to be the truth of women's lot--very far indeed from the contented, minor, feminine dove of earlier views.
Critics of various schools have made different cases for Gaskell as a major novelist, but few critics of any persuasion have paid much attention to her short fiction, focusing instead on her better-known novels and on The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Author of "Jane Eyre," "Shirley," "Villette," etc. (1857). One reason for the comparatively little attention given to Gaskell's short fiction is the small amount of critical interest in short fiction of her period. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when Gaskell began writing, the novel dominated. Like many other writers of this period she wrote short fiction for the increasingly popular periodicals--most notably Charles Dickens's two weeklies, Household Words and All the Year Round --but did not produce many pieces that could be described as true short stories by standard definitions.
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