ABSTRACT
Wives and Daughters (1864–1866), Elizabeth Gaskell's sprawling novel about a young girl's struggle to find her place in the social structures of the provincial English countryside of the 1830s, has been widely praised as a realist masterpiece, second in Gaskell's oeuvre only to the comic Cranford (1851). Henry James, critical of so many long Victorian novels, praised Gaskell's last novel as creating “a world … complete in every particular, from the divine blue of the summer sky to the June-bugs in the roses.” It is so real, James contends, that “the hours given to its perusal seem like hours actually spent, in the flesh as well as the spirit, among the scenes and people described” (Review in the Nation, 22 February 1866). For James, it would seem, Wives and Daughters embodies the “reality effect” that Roland Barthes so famously theorizes in relation to nineteenth-century literature (148), creating a hermetically sealed version of reality into which one can escape.
