Gaskell's interest in change, however, was not the aspect of her work which attracted earlier twentieth-century critics to her. Like so many mid-Victorian writers, she passed rapidly out of fashion. The prevailing attitude taken towards her in the first half of the twentieth century was typified by Lord David Cecil's now notorious characterization of Gaskell, in Early Victorian Novelists, as being ‘all a woman was expected to be; gentle, domestic, tactful, unintellectual, prone to tears, easily shocked’. Her gender, and certain facts about her life – her family, her interest in domestic matters, her connections with Unitarianism – furnished a set of self-fulfilling prophecies when it came to locating certain properties in her writing. At the most extreme, even the care she puts into natural descriptions gets turned round so that her fiction could be described by Stanton Whitfield in 1929 as a ‘nosegay of violets, honeysuckle, lavender, mignonette and sweet briar’. Although in some ways, as we have seen, Cranford may represent quite a bold experimentation in narrative techniques, it is not surprising, given the ostensibly quiet, private nature of its concerns, that this was the novel taken to typify her work at its best.

The 1950s, however, saw a dramatic realignment of Gaskell. No longer was she revered for her presumed femininity, but, following the publication of Kathleen Tillotson's Novels of the Eighteen-Forties in 1954, and the subsequent Marxist appropriation of her by Arnold Kettle (in the Pelican From Dickens to Hardy volume, 1958) and by Raymond Williams, in his highly influential Culture and Society (1958), Gaskell became, above all, known as a Social Problem novelist. Her treatment of the power relations of industrial societies meant that her works were initially read alongside such novels as Disraeli's Sybil, Kingsley's Alton Locke, and Dickens's Hard Times: in comparison with these writers, Williams singles her out for her ‘combination of sympathetic observation and … a largely successful attempt at imaginative identification’ – at least in the first part of Mary Barton, for he loses sympathy with the novel when, as he sees it, Gaskell falls prey to the temptation to melodrama, something which Williams reads as disrupting that unifying factor which animates the best writing, a powerful ‘structure of feeling’.