In a letter, Charles Dickens called Elizabeth Gaskell his ‘dear Scheherezade’, after the story-teller in The Arabian Nights who tells a compulsively fascinating string of stories in order to forestall the revengeful execution of herself and other women. ‘I am sure,’ he wrote, ‘your powers of narrative can never be exhausted in a single night, but must be good for at least a thousand nights and one.’ Gaskell was an inveterate story-teller: her letters are full of anecdotes; she delighted in gossip about people she knew (and picked up and passed on little anecdotes about people she didn't). Her output as a whole dramatizes the heterogeneity of women's histories, of their modes of narrating them, and of the challenges that a woman's viewpoint – or set of viewpoints – might pose to dominant male conventions.

Her short stories and novellas range over periods, places and genres. In some, she tries out themes which are developed at greater length in her novels. For example, in a very early story, ‘The Sexton's Hero’ (1847, published in the radical Howitt's Journal), she interrogates the concept of heroism, locating it in loyalty and endurance rather than in grandiose ideas of public, particularly military, duty. It is, the narrator asserts, a ‘poor, unchristian heroism, whose manifestation consists of injury to others!’ (CPT 317). According to such a system of values, there is more heroism in Jem rescuing his father from a blaze, in Mary Barton, than in all Charley Kinraid's naval successes in Sylvia's Lovers. The short stories necessarily question any idea that heroism or nobility of action might be a male prerogative. Susan Dixon, in ‘Half a Lifetime Ago’, loses Michael, the man who had promised to marry her. She herself had sworn to her dying mother that she would look after her young brother, the ‘feeble’ Willie, a Wordsworthian Idiot Boy, and Michael is not prepared to take on this compassionate charge. Yet years later, Susan attempts to rescue Michael after he has fallen and died from exposure in the snow: she then extends her capacity for love and practical help to his widow and children, who come to live in her home.