Winner of the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award

'A great galloping joy of a book - funny, lyrical, fast paced, heart-warming - a delicious celebration of love and life' Rebecca Stott, author of In the Days of Rain

In 1857, after two years of writing The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell fled England for Rome on the eve of publication. The project had become so fraught with criticism, with different truths and different lies, that Mrs Gaskell couldn't stand it any more. She threw her book out into the world and disappeared to Italy with her two eldest daughters. In Rome she found excitement, inspiration, and love: a group of artists and writers who would become lifelong friends, and a man - Charles Norton - who would become the love of Mrs Gaskell's life, though they would never be together.

In 2013, Nell Stevens is embarking on her Ph.D. - about the community of artists and writers living in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century - and falling drastically in love with a man who lives in another city. As Nell chases her heart around the world, and as Mrs Gaskell forms the greatest connection of her life, these two women, though centuries apart, are drawn together.

Mrs Gaskell and Me is about unrequited love and the romance of friendship, it is about forming a way of life outside the conventions of your time, and it offers Nell the opportunity - even as her own relationship falls apart - to give Mrs Gaskell the ending she deserved.

From the author of the beloved Bleaker House, Mrs Gaskell and Me is the story of two very modern women and their two love affairs, separated by a hundred and fifty years.

About the Author
Nell Stevens has a First in English and Creative Writing from Warwick, after which she went on to study Arabic and Comparative Literature at Harvard, to receive a Marcia Trimble Fellowship and the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Award for her MFA in Fiction at Boston University, and to complete a Ph.D. in Victorian literature at King's College London. She was a finalist in the 2011 Elle magazine Writing Talent Contest, and a runner-up in both the 2014 Mslexia Memoir Competition and the 2015 Mslexia Short Story Prize.

Reviews
A great galloping joy of a book - funny, lyrical, fast paced, heart-warming - a delicious celebration of love and life -- Rebecca Stott, author of In the Days of Rain
A truly lovely book - acutely observed and honest and melancholy -- Jessie Greengrass, author of Sight
A tender, clever, sublimely crafted book that celebrates the struggles and triumphs of writing, love, and the desire for connection -- Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Girl of Ink and Stars
Stevens has an analytical eye and a wonderful taste for absurdity . . . All cake is to be both had and eaten in this celebratory, charming, thoroughly fictional book. -- Claire Harman * The Guardian *
A charming, distinctive memoir that is ultimately an exploration of the power and the pitfalls of storytelling * Mail on Sunday *
Extraordinary, delightful and very moving . . . Stevens's affection for and relationship to these people is real, and very much alive . . . funny, heartfelt * Irish Times *
Clever yet funny . . . Mrs Gaskell & Me has so many interesting things to say about love, loneliness and longing that I'm now inspired to read more of Mrs Gaskells' novels. * Red Magazine *
Mrs Gaskell and Me is innovative and emotionally raw . . . a mature reflection on womanhood, and falling in love with men who we chase all over the world. Nell Stevens writes with a skill and passion all writers could learn from, and all readers will take joy in. -- Laura Jane Williams, author of Ice Cream for Breakfast
A witty, humane work of historical storytelling brilliantly enmeshed with an almost love story that intelligently shows us that it isn't only the happy endings that come to define our lives, but also those loves that cannot be. Stevens' clever, confiding voice is a worthy companion to those of us who have ever felt lost and have looked to the literature of the past for guidance. I loved it -- Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
Perfect -- Lena Dunham on Bleaker House
This year's literary sensation -- Evening Standard on Bleaker House
A mesmerizing literary levitation act . . . lovely and thoughtful -- Vogue on Bleaker House
You won't be able to put this down * Elle Magazine *


Awards
Short-listed for Somerset Maugham Award 2019 (UK).



Book Information
ISBN 9781509868186
Author Nell Stevens
Format Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint Picador
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Weight(grams) 418g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 135mm * 24mm