Editions

Wives and Daughters

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099540724

  • Length: 656  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 33mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 472g

  • RRP: £8.99

Wives and Daughters

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

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099540724

  • Length: 656  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 33mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 472g

  • RRP: £8.99

Reviews

  • 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

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About the Author

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810 - 65) was born in London, but grew up in the north of England in the village of Knutsford. In 1832 she married the Rev. William Gaskell and had four daughters, and one son who died in infancy. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848 and won the attention of Charles Dickens and most of her later work was publish in his journals. She was also a lifelong friend of Charlotte Bronte, whose biography she wrote, as well as her many novels and short stories. Patricia Ingham is Senior Research Fellow and Reader at St Anne's College, Oxford. She has written on the Victorian novel and on Hardy in particular. she is the General Editor of all Hardy's fiction in the Penguin Classics and has edited Gaskell's North and South for the series.

Elizabeth Gaskell

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