Wives and Daughters Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn

Annotation:
In Elizabeth Gaskell's warmhearted last novel, Molly Gibson's father is remarried to a shallow woman right out of Jane Austen, and becomes friends with her new stepsister, Cynthia, who is involved in a secret engagement to a man in a class below her own. Then Molly herself falls in love with a man who is drawn to the more beautiful Cynthia. As, with her customary incisiveness and clear eye, Gaskell explores the relationships between these characters, she also provides a lively portrait of the class system in Victorian England, and of a young woman who thirsts for learning as she struggles to transcend the traditional female role.

Author Bio

Elizabeth Gaskell

A beautiful, extroverted, much-loved woman, Elizabeth Gaskell was married at 22 to a Unitarian minister in Manchester, with whom she had four daughters, and a son who died in infancy. She wrote her first novel (MARY BARTON) in 1848 to distract herself from the baby's death. Charles Dickens, impressed by the novel, became a staunch supporter of her work, though the two never got along personally. Gaskell's life in Manchester led directly to the themes of her fiction; she saw firsthand the social ills caused by the gulf between rich and poor, and crusaded for tolerance, better labor conditions, and the reconciliation of the classes. She was a friend of Ruskin, the Carlyles, and Florence Nightingale, and a particularly close friend of Charlotte Bront?, of whom she wrote a controversial biography. She wrote a total of only six novels, dying suddenly at age 55 on the eve of her husband's retirement.

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Wives and Daughters (Hardcover)

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