TALK & AFTERNOON TEA
SPOTLIGHT on MRS ELIZABETH GASKELL with AUTHOR NELL STEVENS
Wednesday 7th May at 3.00pm
Interview with author Nell Stevens
Celebrated Victorian author Elizabeth Gaskell spent much of her childhood in Knutsford, where she was brought up by her aunt, after her mother died when she was only 13 months old.
The town was later immortalised in her novel Cranford and this, together with Mary Barton and North and South have been re-imagined many times for the TV and silver screen.
More recently, author Nell Stevens, Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick, has sought to explore the woman behind the bestsellers, with a fanciful tale of two parallel doomed love affairs, in her 2018 novel Mrs Gaskell and Me, which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award.
Nell’s latest novel is ‘The Original‘
‘A sinuous, thrilling meditation on fakes and forgers, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier and Sarah Waters‘ – OLIVIA LAING
Interviewer: Fran Pridham
