Sylvia's Lovers — Volume 1
1863
Gaskell's darkest and most bracing novel unfolds in the 1790s on the rugged Yorkshire coast, where the whaling town of Monkshaven lives and dies by the sea. Sylvia Robson is a girl who wants a new cloak and a life of her own, but desire is dangerous in a world where the press-gang roams the streets, dragging men onto ships bound for a war they never chose. When her sweetheart is lost to the ocean, Sylvia marries the steady Philip Hepburn, building a life on what she believes is grief's only remaining option. But the man who shares her bed may know more about that drowning than he has ever admitted. The novel crackles with tension from its first pages: this is Gaskell unchained from her usual gentility, writing about class resentment, economic desperation, and the brutal mathematics of survival. The sea is never just scenery here. It is the great devourer, and everyone in Monkshaven lives in its shadow.
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“... that kind of patriotism which consists in hating all other nations ...””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“Daniel was very like a child in all the parts of his character. He was strongly affected by whatever was present, and apt to forget the absent. He acted on impulse, and too often had reason to be sorry for it; but he hated his sorrow too much to let it teach him wisdom for the future.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“The morning brought more peace if it did not entirely dissipate fear.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“Ay! but mother's words are scarce, and weigh heavy. Father's liker me, and we talk a deal o' rubble; but mother's words are liker to hewn stone. She puts a deal o' meaning in 'em.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“All the morning since he got up he had been trying to fight through his duties”
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“But between the busy heads and over-reaching arms he could see Charley and Sylvia, sitting close together, talking and listening more than eating. She was in a new strange state of happiness not to be reasoned about, or accounted for, but in a state of more exquisite feeling than she had ever experienced before;””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“in St Jean d'Acre;””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“Fancy is three parts o' love.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“La atracción son tres cuartas partes del amor.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
