Wives and Daughters: Elizabeth Gaskell (The Penguin English Library) - Softcover

Gaskell, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014138946X ISBN 13: 9780141389462

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2012

Synopsis

The Penguin English Library Edition of Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

"Eh, miss, but that be a rare young lady! She do have such pretty coaxing ways ..."

Seventeen-year-old Molly Gibson worships her widowed father. But when he decides to remarry, Molly's life is thrown off course by the arrival of her vain, shallow and selfish stepmother. There is some solace in the shape of her new stepsister Cynthia, who is beautiful, sophisticated and irresistible to every man she meets. Soon the girls become close, and Molly finds herself cajoled into becoming a go-between in Cynthia's love affairs. But in doing so, Molly risks ruining her reputation in the gossiping village of Hollingford - and jeopardizing everything with the man she is secretly in love with.

The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

About this title

Review:

Wives and Daughters is set in the mid-19th century in the small village of Hollingford, in rural England. The Industrial Revolution hasn't yet thrown the country into turmoil, and the railway is just beginning to cut a swathe through the land. It sounds old-fashioned, (and there are themes in the novel which date it) but Gaskell's witty, warm tale of love and longing is surprisingly contemporary. Much of the fun in Wives And Daughters comes from Gaskell's sprightly characterisation, and willful insistence on the unconventional hero and heroine, both worthy, principled, and a little tedious. Molly Gibson, the doctor's daughter, is intelligent, spiritedly dutiful and given to much silent endurance. The object of her affections is Squire Hamley's younger son "Good Roger! Kind Roger! Dear Roger!", a sort of duller Darwin. The course of true love doesn't run smooth, thanks in the main, to the scintillating Cynthia, Molly's step sister. Cynthia is a glorious creation, willful, sinful and incredibly attractive, who, with her French education, strolls through the novel with "the free stately step of some wild animal of the forest"--moving almost, as it were, to the continual sound of music. Cynthia's mother, the epitome of snobbery and self-deceit, whose "words were ready-made clothes, and never fitted individual thoughts" adds to the piquant entertainment. The novel revolves around the trails and tribulations, the questionable reputations of the inhabitants of Hollingford. It was Gaskell's last and most mature work, powerful and engrossing in structure and unfinished. As her daughter reported, in January 1866, Elizabeth Gaskell died: "quite suddenly, without a moments warning, in the midst of a sentence" leaving the last chapter incomplete. Wives and Daughters is just a few pages short of an all embracing happy ending.--Eithne Farry

Review:

A superb edition - Easson's notes are well done - genuinely helpful - and the supporting scholarly materials (introduction, textual variants, bibliography) are also valuable. (Dr. C. J. Walsh, St Mary's College, Strawberry Hill)

A useful introduction and notes. Will use it on a course concerned with the relationships between thought and history through an analysis of rural society (W. J. Gregory, Newcastle Polytechnic.)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 014138946X
• ISBN 13: 9780141389462
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 816