It is time to move on from those corpse-strewn specials of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford shown on television at Christmas. For fans of the increasingly popular Victorian novelist, the mood of 2010 is distinctly cheerier, this being the year they celebrate their heroine’s bicentenary.

The author of Cranford, North and South and Wives and Daughters (all of them titles enthusiastically dramatised by the BBC in recent years), Mrs Gaskell was born in London on September 29, 1810, and on September 25 this year she will be honoured in the city of her birth when her name is added to a stained-glass memorial window in Poets’ Corner. For much of the rest of the year, however, the focus of commemoration will be on her adopted home city of Manchester (or “Drumble” as she calls it in Cranford).

From April 1 to 29, Manchester’s Portico Library (of which her husband William was a member) hosts an exhibition that draws on her long connection with the city, where William served as a Unitarian minister. On April 8, the president of the Gaskell Society, Alan Shelston, will give a talk at the library, previewing his new biography of Mrs Gaskell (due from Hesperus Press in May), and on April 13 the library hosts a costumed presentation, “Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë”, based on the novelists’ close friendship and mostly in their own words (theportico.org.uk/gallery.htm).

A second Manchester exhibition, “Elizabeth Gaskell: A Connected Life”, will run from July 14 to November 28 at the Christie Gallery of the John Rylands University Library (manchester.ac.uk/library), dealing with Gaskell’s extraordinarily wide circle of friends and acquaintance, ranging from the poorest Mancunian factory workers to Florence Nightingale and Charles Dickens. The exhibition draws on the library’s own extensive collection of Gaskelliana, including the manuscript of Wives and Daughters and the writer’s inkstand and paper-knife, but will also include loans from Mrs Gaskell’s descendants: her 1854 portrait by Samuel Laurence, and her passport (which shows how unusually widely travelled she was for a woman of her time). From the Brotherton Library at Leeds University (where it is on permanent loan from the Gaskell family) it will borrow her manuscript diary of 1835-38, in which she interestingly records her thoughts on the character development of her infant daughter Marianne, born in 1834.

Also at the library on August 14 the costume collector Lucy Adlington and the costume historian Gillian Stapleton, performing as History Wardrobe (historywardrobe.com), will present a one-hour costumed talk, “Elegant Economy — the Clothes of Cranford”, showing how the writer used clothing to reveal character in her novels. “We were planning to cover both Gaskell and Dickens,” explains Ms Adlington, “but — with the exception of Miss Havisham’s decrepit wedding dress — Dickens is lousy at giving costume clues for female characters, so we jettisoned him to concentrate on the revealing details in Cranford and Wives and Daughters.” Interestingly, Mrs Gaskell’s own wedding veil has come down in the family and was worn by her great-great and her great-great-great-granddaughters at their own weddings in 1952 and 1985.

In April/May and again in September/October, attention shifts 10 miles or so from Manchester to Knutsford in Cheshire, the town where Mrs Gaskell grew up and on which she based the fictional Cranford. On the weekend of April 10-11 there will be guided walks in Tabley Park, Knutsford, a favourite picnic spot of hers (elizabethgaskell.co.uk; tableyhouse.co.uk). Then, from May 14 to 17, a flower and costume festival, complete with Victorian teas, will take place at Knutsford’s Brook Street Chapel, where Mrs Gaskell and her husband are buried (brookstreetchapel.org).

On her actual birthday (September 29), the Gaskell Society’s chairwoman Elizabeth Williams will give a talk at this chapel about the author’s life and works, followed by lunch and a Knutsford walk, and on October 3 the chapel will be the venue for a commemorative service, followed by a wreath-laying. On October 8, at Tatton Park (which appears as Cumnor Towers in Wives and Daughters), Ed Potton and Fran Baker from the John Rylands Library will lecture on “Elizabeth Gaskell and the 19th-century novel”.

Adding an international flavour to the year, a weekend event in Brussels, being organised for April 24-25 by the Belgian branch of the Brontë Society (thebrusselsbrontegroup.org) commemorates Mrs Gaskell’s close association with Charlotte Brontë, of whom she was the first and best-known biographer. A talk by Professor Angus Easson, editor of Mrs Gaskell’s “Life of Charlotte Brontë” for the Oxford World’s Classics series, will cover the painstaking first-hand research she did in Brussels into the time Miss Brontë spent there.

On June 9 an Elizabeth Gaskell study day at Sheffield University will focus on the writer’s novellas and longer short stories, and on June 16, back in Manchester, at the city’s Metropolitan University, the actress Gabrielle Drake will give a gala performance of her one-woman show, Dear Scheherazade, based on the writer’s novels and letters (its title deriving from Mrs Gaskell’s friend and editor Charles Dickens, who christened her “my dear Scheherazade” in tribute to her Arabian Nights-style storytelling.

Presented jointly by the Gaskell Society (gaskellsociety.co.uk) and the Manchester Historic Buildings Trust, the performance will help to raise funds for a £2.75 million restoration of 84 Plymouth Grove, the Grade II* listed Manchester house where Mrs Gaskell lived from 1850 to 1865 and produced most of her work (tickets £15, to include refreshments; box office 0161 247 1306).