Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, prompted Charles Dickens (who called her my dear Scheherazade) to request Gaskell's work for his magazine Household Words. She contributed Cranford, still her best known work. Gaskell's gothic ghost stories are less widely read but are classics of the genre. Mrs. Gaskell was a friend of the reclusive Charlotte Brontë, and wrote her earliest biography.