HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'I'll not listen to reason, she said, now in full possession of her voice, which had been rather choked with sobbing. Reason always means what someone else has got to say. 'First published in serial format in a magazine, Gaskell's Cranford is a delightfully light-hearted series of stories about early Victorian life in a country village. Following the lives of two spinster sisters, Miss Matty and Miss Deborah as they gossip about the inconsequential goings-on of the community around them, Gaskell's best-loved work affectionately comments on the role of women in society at that time and the changing face of the Victorian world.

Life changes completely for Margaret Hale and her parents when they move to a smoky northern city. There, Margaret meets Mr Thornton, a wealthy cotton mill owner, and dislikes him immediately. But the mill owner falls passionately in love with her. Then his workers strike. Against a background of industrial drama and personal tragedy, is there any hope for Mr Thornton's dream?

Life in the small English town of Cranford seems very quiet and peaceful. The ladies of Cranford lead tidy, regular lives. They make their visits between the hours of twelve and three, give little evening parties, and worry about their maid-servants. But life is not always smooth — there are little arguments and jealousies, sudden deaths and unexpected marriages... Mrs Gaskell's timeless picture of small-town life in the first half of the nineteenth century has delighted readers for nearly 150 years.

«‘In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked fearful self, so like me my soul seemed to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude of body it belonged…’ Elizabeth Gaskell is better known today for her pioneering social novels such as «Mary Barton» (1848) but she also wrote some fascinating tales of the supernatural and the macabre, which are collected here in this volume. The real charm of this dark anthology is its variety. Unlike so many writers of this kind of material, Gaskell allows the story to fit the style rather than the other way around and as result there is a charming freshness to each tale. This remarkable author uses different voices, tones and topics to engage her readers and as you turn from one story to the next you cannot be quite sure what to expect.»

Each volume in the Collector's Library series has a specially commissioned Afterword, brief biography of the author and a further reading list. The Afterword is by leading UK playwright, novelist and Sherlockian, David Stuart Davies.

«The sheer variety and accomplishment of Elizabeth Gaskell's shorter fiction is amazing.This new volume contains six of her finest stories that have been selected specifically to demonstrate this, and to trace the development of her art. As diverse in setting as in subject matter, these tales move from the gentle comedy of life in a small English country town in «Dr Harrison's Confessions», to atmospheric horror in far north-west Wales with «The Doom of the Griffiths». The story of «Cousin Phillis», her masterly tale of love and loss, is a subtle, complex and perceptive analysis of changes in English national life during an industrial age, while the gripping «Lois the Witch» recreates the terrors of the Salem witchcraft trials in seventeenth-century New England, as «Gaskell» shrewdly shows the numerous roots of this furious outbreak of delusion. Whimsically modified fairy tales are set in a French chateau, while an engaging love story poetically evokes peasant life in wine-growing Germany.»

Focusing on two families, the Gibsons and the Hamleys, this novel describes the habits, loyalties, prejudices, petty snobberies, rumours and adjustments of a whole countryside hierarchy.

Set in the mid-19th century, and written from the author's first-hand experience, North and South follows the story of the heroine's movement from the tranquil but moribund ways of southern England to the vital but turbulent north. Elizabeth Gaskell's skilful narrative uses an unusual love story to show how personal and public lives were woven together in a newly industrial society. This is a tale of hard-won triumphs — of rational thought over prejudice and of humane care over blind deference to the market. Readers in the twenty-first century will find themselves absorbed as this Victorian novel traces the origins of problems and possibilities which are still challenging a hundred and fifty years later: the complex relationships, public and private, between men and women of different classes.