Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65) wrote to her friend Eliza Fox about the difficulties she experienced in juggling the priorities in her life. She claims that she has ‘a great number of “Mes” ’:

Gaskell was writing in 1850, after the appearance of Mary Barton (1848) and a couple of pieces of short fiction, but before the remainder of her major works appeared: Ruth (1853), Cranford (1853), North and South (1855), a biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), Sylvia's Lovers (1863) and, posthumously, Wives and Daughters (1866). Additionally, she was to publish a number of shorter works. Some of these are novella length (The Moorland Cottage, 1850; My Lady Ludlow, 1858; Cousin Phillis, 1863); some are short stories; some, like ‘The Last Generation in England’ (1849), are part essay, part memoir. The diversity of these works appears in their subject matter, their form, and their relation to other genres: they are as evasive of easy generalization as Gaskell found her sense of herself to be.

The lines which Gaskell wrote to Eliza Fox are symptomatic of issues which recur throughout her writings. The theme of conflicting senses of identity is prominent in her fiction. So, too, is her manipulation of the tension which arises when individuals are subjected to rival demands, whether these demands come from the claims others make on them, or from inner debates produced by moral dilemmas. In particular, Gaskell was aware of the various types of constraints faced both by women in general, during a period strongly affected by notions of social duties and propriety, and by the more specific pressures faced by a woman writer, especially one, like herself, with a family.