The Poor Clare is a short story by English Victorian writer Elizabeth Gaskell. First serialised in three installments in 1856 Charles Dickens' popular magazine Household Words, The Poor Clare is a gothic ghost story about a young woman unwittingly cursed by her own grandmother. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, (née Stevenson; 29 September 1810 - 12 November 1865), often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor, and are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Brontë. In this biography, she only wrote the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë's life, the rest she left out, deciding that certain, more salacious aspects of her life were better kept hidden. Some of Gaskell's best known novels are Cranford (1851-53), North and South (1854-55), and Wives and Daughters (1865).