Mrs Gaskell and Me: Two Women, Two Love Stories, Two Centuries Apart

· Pan Macmillan
Ebook
256
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

Winner of the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award

'A great galloping joy of a book - funny, lyrical, fast paced, heart-warming – a delicious celebration of love and life' – Rebecca Stott, author of In the Days of Rain


In 1857, Elizabeth Gaskell set sail for Rome, a city that would prove to be a place of inspiration and love: she would make enduring friendships, and meet a man – Charles Norton – who would become the love of her life.

In 2013, Nell Stevens is writing about Mrs Gaskell in Rome, and falling drastically in love with a man who lives in another city altogether. As Nell chases her heart around the world, and as Mrs Gaskell forms the greatest connection of her life, these two women, though centuries apart, are drawn together, and for Nell, Mrs Gaskell becomes more than a figure from the past. Here is a confidante, a friend, a woman who – living outside the conventions of her time – might have some wisdom to offer Nell.

Mrs Gaskell and Me is about unrequited love and the romance of friendship, it is about forming a way of life outside the conventions of your time, and it offers Nell the opportunity – even as her own relationship falls apart – to give Mrs Gaskell the ending she deserved.

About the author

Nell Stevens has a First in English and Creative Writing from Warwick, after which she went on to study Arabic and Comparative Literature at Harvard, and to receive a Marcia Trimble Fellowship and the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Award for her MFA in Fiction at Boston University. She is currently researching a Ph.D. in Victorian literature at King's College London. She was a finalist in the 2011 Elle magazine Writing Talent Contest, and a runner-up in both the 2014 Mslexia Memoir Competition and the 2015 Mslexia Short Story Prize. Her first book, Bleaker House, was published in 2017.

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