As a provincial novelist, she relates to George Eliot and
Thomas Hardy in her paintings of life in regional
communities.
Elizabeth, like Fitzgerald, became famous
with her first novel Mary Barton (1848), depicting the
grim conditions of Manchester factory workers, using
colourfully their dialect in her
writings.
Cranford is her next success, a
nostalgic novel recalling memories of her childhood in the
small Cheshire town of Knutsford, with affectionate pictures
of a way of life about to become an
anachronism.
Her biography of Charlotte Bront‰ (1857) is a
reference.
