Livi Michael in conversation

Blackwell’s Manchester welcomes novelist Livi Michael for the launch of her latest novel, Elizabeth & Ruth. Returning to the shop, Michael appears in conversation with Emma Liggins, co-director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, to explore a work that reimagines a pivotal moment in nineteenth-century literary and social history.

Set in Victorian Manchester, Elizabeth & Ruth follows Elizabeth Gaskell at a moment of moral and creative reckoning, as she becomes involved in the fate of a young Irish woman newly released from prison. Drawing on real correspondence between Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the novel examines censorship, hypocrisy and social prejudice, as well as the personal cost of compassion in a society resistant to change.

Blending historical research with imaginative storytelling, the novel offers a vivid portrait of Manchester and its inequalities, while interrogating whose stories are allowed to be told and whose are silenced. Michael’s approach brings new urgency to familiar literary figures, revealing the tensions between respectability, activism and artistic freedom.

This conversation offers insight into the novel’s historical sources, its engagement with Victorian literature and reform, and the challenges of writing fiction that gives voice to those erased from the record.