Round the Sofa

By Elizabeth Gaskell

Round the Sofa is the title of a two-volume collection of short stories by the famous nineteenth-century English novelist and writer Elizabeth Gaskell. It includes "My Lady Ludlow," "The Half-Brothers" and "An Accursed Race." The latter is in the form of a historical essay that condemns the racism and the persecution exercised on a group of people named the Cagots in the west of France. "Round the Sofa" is also the title of the first short story of the collection. Narrated in the first person, "Round the Sofa" takes the form of a preface to the longer "My Lady Ludlow." The young female narrator is ill and is sent to live near the house of her doctor, Mr. Dawson. After a number of visits, the narrator befriends Mrs. Dawson and expresses her true love for her: "But that Mrs. Dawson! The mention of her comes into my mind like the bright sunshine into our dingy little room came on those days; — as a sweet scent of violets greets the sorrowful passer among the woodlands." It is Mrs. Dawson who, after long instance from the narrator, will tell the story of Lady Ludlow, the widowed Countess of Hanbury.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JH
• Release date: Apr 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9788834133897

Elizabeth Gaskell

Mrs Gaskell was born Elizabeth Stevenson in London in 1810. Her mother Eliza, the niece of the potter Josiah Wedgwood, died when she was a child. Much of her childhood was spent in Cheshire, where she lived with an aunt at Knutsford, a town she would later immortalise as Cranford. In 1832, she married a Unitarian minister, William Gaskell (who had a literary career of his own), and they settled in Manchester. The industrial surroundings offered her inspiration for her novels. Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848. The best-known of her other novels are Cranford (1853) and North and South (1855). Elizabeth met Charlotte Brontë in 1850, and they struck up a great friendship. After Charlotte's death in 1855, her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, asked Gaskell to write her biography to counteract gossip and speculation. The Life of Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857. Gaskell was also a skilled proponent of the ghost story. Her last novel, Wives and Daughters, said by many to be her most mature work remained unfinished at the time of her death in 1865.