A. W. Ward, 8 vols. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1906), provides relevant and useful historical information. Even more invaluable to the modern critic is John Geoffrey Sharps, Mrs. Gaskell's Observation and Invention: A Study of Her Non-Biographic Works (Sussex: Linden Press, 1970), which is exhaustively researched and includes relatively obscure background detail on all of Gaskell's works of fiction, short and long. Finally, no Gaskellian library is complete without The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and A. Pollard (Manchester: Mandolin Press, 1997), which provides the clearest insight of all into the writer as written by herself.

Apart from these full-length works, there are several articles written about some of the stories in this collection. For the publishing background to ‘The Old Nurse's Story’, it is worth consulting Annette B. Hopkins, ‘Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 9: 4 (1945–6), pp. 357–85. Also of interest is Carol A. Martin, ‘Gaskell's Ghosts: Truths in disguise’, Studies in the Novel, 21: 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 27–40. Janice K. Kirkland, ‘“Curious, If True”: Suggesting more’, and Peter Stiles, ‘Calvin's encounter with Cinderella: Vital antinomies in Elizabeth Gaskell's ”Curious, If True (1860)”’, in Gaskell Society Journal, 12 (1998), pp. 21–7 and 14–20, are particularly interesting. J. R. Watson, ‘“Round the Sofa”: Elizabeth Gaskell tells stories’, Yearbook of English Studies, 26 (1996), pp. 89–99, also provides useful readings.

New work on the Gothic genre is continually being produced, but readers interested in the genre in particular would be well advised to consult the standard text in the field, David Punter's The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980), which is still one of the best sources for a wide-ranging approach to the fiction. Also useful is Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), which introduces the history and conventions of the genre. Of especial interest is Maggie Kilgour's The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London: Routledge, 1995), an ambitious overview of the field which provides excellent, detailed readings of the most famous works of Gothic fiction, as well as some lesser-known examples. For an excellent study of Victorian Gothic fiction, see Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

NOTE ON THE TEXTS

The stories and novellas in this collection are arranged chronologically, in order of their first published appearance in periodicals; the texts are taken from the last volume editions published in England during Elizabeth Gaskell's lifetime, over which she presumably exercised some level of authorial control (see headnotes to Notes for details).

However, a close collation of the various editions reveals very few differences between the texts.

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