Half a Life-Time Ago

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About this book

Half a Life-Time Ago is by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. The text names a single woman, Susan Dixon, who lived in one of the Westmoreland dales half a life-time ago. Susan Dixon was owner of the small farm-house where she resided, and of some thirty or forty acres of land by which it was surrounded.

The text says that fifty or fifty-one years ago William Dixon and his wife Margaret were alive, and that Susan, their daughter, was about eighteen years old, ten years older than the only other child, a boy named after his father. A speaker says to a lad, I never will let thee go, and adds that there is no knowing where they would take thee to, or what they would do with thee. Susan saddled her horse, and rode fast where the wind had drifted the snow on one side and the road was clear and bare, but dismounted and led her steed where the soft, deceitful heaps were massed up.

About the author

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was an English novelist and biographer whose fiction ranged across Victorian society from mill towns to country parishes. Remembered for Mary Barton, Cranford, and North and South, she wrote with sympathy for the poor and for women, and produced the first major life of her friend Charlotte Bronte.