Wives and Daughters
1866
The novel that death left unfinished. When Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly in 1865, she left behind a story that traces the quiet devastation of a young woman's heart in a world that prizes beauty over goodness. Molly Gibson is seventeen, devoted to her widowed father, and utterly unprepared for the arrival of her new stepmother, a woman as vain and hollow as Cynthia, her dazzling stepsister, is magnetic. What begins as a story of social climbing and village gossip transforms into something far more sinister: a young woman slowly realizing that her generosity has become her vulnerability. Molly arranges trysts for Cynthia, shields her secrets, and watches her own chances at happiness slip away in the process. The prose is deceptively gentle, but beneath its civil surface churns class anxiety and the particular cruelty of loving someone more than they will ever love you back. Gaskell died before she could finish it, and the ending cannot quite contain the tragedy she was building toward. It endures because it captures, with devastating precision, how kindness can become a form of self-destruction.
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“Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“How easy it is to judge rightly after one sees what evil comes from judging wrongly.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“There is nothing like wounded affection for giving poignancy to anger.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“I won't say she was silly, but I think one of us was silly, and it was not me.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“The French girls would tell you, to believe that you were pretty would make you so.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“I say, Gibson, we're old friends, and you're a fool if you take anything I say as an offence. Madam your wife and I did not hit it off the only time I ever saw her. I won't say she was silly, but I think one of us was silly, and it was not me.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“Did I ever say an engagement was an elephant, madam?””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“I would far rather have two or three lilies of the valley gathered for me by a person I like, than the most expensive bouquet that could be bought!””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
“I daresay it seems foolish; perhaps all our earthly trials will appear foolish to us after a while; perhaps they seem so now to angels. But we are ourselves, you know, and this is now, not some time to come, a long, long way off. And we are not angels, to be comforted by seeing the ends for which everything is sent.””
— Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
