When Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first novel Mary Barton, she had various anxieties of female authorship. She was not only a woman but also the wife of a minister, whose parishioner included many manufacturers, and the mother of four daughters. She also had an anxiety about appearing in public. In spite of those anxieties, however, she wrote the industrial novel, a male genre, which covers politics, economy, history and theology. Her boldness in starting her career as a writer with such a book came from her faith that her ability of writing was God`s gift and her ministry was using it for the weak and the poor against economic and sexual exploitation. Gaskell strove to have her own voice criticizing patriarchal appropriation of God`s will. Her religion of Unitarianism helped her to have a marginalized perspective to challenge her culture`s dominant ideology of class and gender. Her struggle to have narrative authority is paralleled by three main characters` struggles to speak out. The inability of Esther and John Barton to have their words heard is intrinsically related to Gaskell`s doubts about her ability of speaking to change the world. Mary Barton`s progress to speak, overcoming conflicts between speech and silence, shows Gaskell`s own story to learn to speak. To help the weak and the poor was not only the principle which Gaskell suggested for the relation between the middle and working classes, and between men and women; but it was also the religious duty which made her to have the sense of urgency to speak. It enabled her to establish narrative authority to speak against dominant ideology and social practices of patriarchal culture.