Gibson quickly packs his daughter off for a long promised visit to a nearby family, Squire and Mrs. Gibson’s young pupils has fallen in love with the almost seventeen year old Molly, and, worse, tried to declare his love by secret letter to the oblivious Molly. Writing in the 1860s, Gaskell chose to set the story in the 1830s, the time of her girlhood, making Molly her own contemporary, and while the fashions and lifestyles may have changed somewhat over the years, the characters that Gaskell peoples her book with are instantly recognizable.Īs the novel begins, one of Mr. It is a very human story, very relatable regardless of the decade or century. Bad marriages are made and people die of lingering illnesses but these are the worst things that happen in Molly’s world. There are dramas of every sort going on around Molly but they are of the small, domestic kind. And yet it is not in the least sensational. It has everything you could want: romances of every kind, comedy, tragedy, mystery, and delicious secrets. Instead, I shall call it a novel-ish sort of novel. I hesitate to call it a coming-of-age story, knowing how some readers recoil in horror from anything so labelled, though it certainly is the chronicle of Molly Gibson’s steady growth and maturation. Wives and Daughters, for those not already acquainted with Gaskell’s masterpiece, is primarily the story of Molly Gibson, the daughter of a widowed country doctor. Each time I reread it, I come away feeling the same: after hundreds of pages, with the happy conclusion in sight, the abrupt end is always a shock and there is always disappointment that, even though you know how Gaskell intended to end the story, you’ll never have the pleasure of seeing how she would have executed it, what artistry and skill she would have employed in giving our heroine her much-deserved happiness.
Gaskell penned before her death to the satisfactory outline of an ending contributed in her absence by her editor. It was a summer while I was still in high school, I know, and I remember finishing it as I rode the bus home from work, missing my stop as I read those last pages, reeling with both delight and a sense of immense loss as the story transitioned from the last rather anti-climactic sentence Mrs. I can’t remember exactly when I first read Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, what urged me to select it in the first place.
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