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  • Published: 15 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099540724
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 656
  • RRP: $24.99

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: 15 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099540724
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 656
  • RRP: $24.99

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The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
The Good Soldier
Selected Poetry
Venus in Furs
Man and Superman
Military Dispatches
The Prelude

About the author

Elizabeth Gaskell

ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810–1865) was born Elizabeth Stevenson in London, the daughter of a Unitarian minister who resigned his position on conscientious grounds. Her mother died a year after her birth, and Gaskell spent her formative years in the care of relatives in northern England. In 1832, she married William Gaskell, a well-known Unitarian minister, and joined him to work among the poor for social reform. They had four daughters, as well as a son who died in infancy. His death left Gaskell so distraught that she began writing for distraction. Her first major success was the novel Mary Barton (1848)—published, as were her first several works of short fiction, under the pseudonym Cotton Mather Mills. For many years, she also wrote regularly for Charles Dickens’s magazine, Household Words, contributing stories and a serialized novel, Cranford. Meanwhile, the Gaskells’ home in Manchester became a popular stop for writers and reformers, including Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Ruskin, and Charlotte Brontë, who became a close friend. After Brontë’s death, her father, Patrick Brontë, asked Gaskell to write her biography. The Life of Charlotte Brontë proved a pioneering and controversial psychological study of Brontë’s family life, and remains perhaps the most important book on the writer. Gaskell died of a heart attack in 1865. A memorial to her lies at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Also by Elizabeth Gaskell

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Praise for Wives and Daughters

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

Guardian

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

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

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

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

Scotsman