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  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409058014
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 656
Categories:

Wives and Daughters




September 2010 is the bicentenary of Gaskell's birth. This tender story of parents, children and step-children, mistakes and secrets was Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel and is considered her masterpiece.


This tender story of parents, children and step-children, mistakes and secrets was Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel and is considered her masterpiece.

Set in the watchful society of Hollingford, this is a warm tale of love and longing. Molly Gibson is the spirited, loyal daughter of the local doctor. Their peaceful close-knit home is turned upside down when Molly's father decides to remarry. Whilst Molly struggles to adjust to her snobbish stepmother, she forms a close relationship with her glamorous new stepsister Cynthia. The strength of this friendship is soon tested as their lives become entwined with Squire Hamley and his two sons.

‘Gaskell's work will always be one of the adornments of liberal Britain’ Guardian

  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409058014
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 656
Categories:

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About the author

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born in London in 1810, but she spent her formative years in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon and the north of England. In 1832 she married the Reverend William Gaskell, who became well known as the minister of the Unitarian Chapel in Manchester's Cross Street. As well as leading a busy domestic life as minister's wife and mother of four daughters, she worked among the poor, traveled frequently and wrote. Mary Barton (1848) was her first success.

Two years later she began writing for Dickens's magazine, Household Words, to which she contributed fiction for the next thirteen years, notably a further industrial novel, North and South (1855). In 1850 she met and secured the friendship of Charlotte Brontë. After Charlotte's death in March 1855, Patrick Brontë chose his daughter's friend and fellow-novelist to write The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), a probing and sympathetic account, that has attained classic stature.

Elizabeth Gaskell's position as a clergyman's wife and as a successful writer introduced her to a wide circle of friends, both from the professional world of Manchester and from the larger literary world. Her output was substantial and completely professional. Dickens discovered her resilient strength of character when trying to impose his views on her as editor of Household Words. She proved that she was not to be bullied, even by such a strong-willed man.

Her later works, Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Cousin Phillis (1864) and Wives and Daughters (1866) reveal that she was continuing to develop her writing in new literary directions. Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly in November 1865.

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Praise for Wives and Daughters

Her stories are wonderfully funny, but the ridiculous is bathed in a poignant, dreamlike mood found nowhere else in fiction, and profound ideas and strong values sleep beneath everyday details of bonnets and cakes

Jenny Uglow

My dear Scheherazade...I am sure your powers of narrative can never be exhausted in a single night, but must be good for at least a thousand nights and one

Charles Dickens

Pah! to Dickens. Eat your heart out, Little Nell. That Elizabeth Gaskell could write a death scene to make your socks melt

Scotsman

People who read her always come away surprised at how modern she sounds. You don't have to think yourself into her century in order to sympathise, since her guiding principle was no more or less than a sense of practical, day-today justice, totally outside the abiding gentleman-lady-peasant-donkey-peasant's wife hierarchy which surrounded her

Zoe Williams, Evening Standard

She was a pioneer, multi-tasking mother... Gaskell's work will always be one of the adornments of liberal Britain

Guardian