Elizabeth Gaskell judged him as intransigent and bigoted, adding however, that (Charlotte) would never have been happy but with an exacting, rigid, law-giving, passionate man.
William and Mary mixed with many of the important literary figures of the day including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Other television appearances included playing Lady Glenmire in the 1972 version of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, alongside Pat Coombs.
Elizabeth Gaskell, in Mary Barton describes an Italian torture chamber where the victim is afforded many luxuries at first but in the end the walls of the cell start closing in and finally they crush him.
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Etel also played the bright-eyed ragamuffin Harry Gregson in the six-part TV adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cranford" for the BBC and WGBH, which was transmitted on BBC 1 in the autumn of 2007 and co-starred Philip Glenister, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Francesca Annis and Imelda Staunton.
Bessie Rayner Parkes’ wide circle of literary and political friends included George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Elizabeth Blackwell, Lord Shaftesbury, Herbert Spencer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, John Ruskin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
The library holds personal papers and letters of notable figures, among them Elizabeth Gaskell and John Dalton.
Sandy Welch's works for the BBC have included The Magnificent 7, adaptations of Charles Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, and most recently the BBC's well-received 2006 interpretation of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.