ABSTRACT
There is no need to declare a case for Wives and Daughter s: where Cranford is the most widely read of her works, Wives and Daughters is that most generally praised and admitted to the ranks of excellence. Yet it is easy to over-simplify its place there, its affinities, and its achievement. True as it is to link Wives and Daughters with Cranford and with Cousin Phillis and thus to set it apart from the novels of social concern, Mary Barton and North and Souths and from the tragedy of Sylvia’s Lovers; right as it may possibly be to delight in it as her last and crowning achievement; and accurate though it is to regard it as the nineteenth-century heir to the riches of Jane Austen, these truths, separately or together, do not do it full justice, and are inaccurate through being only part of the truth. Wives and Daughters does resemble Cranford in that both are based upon Elizabeth Gas-kell’s childhood home, Knutsford in Cheshire, and treat the lives and doings of small-town people with sympathy and humour. It resembles Cousin Phillis in conveying emotions deep and poignant even though their causes are modest and homely, which are interpenetrated by the movement of the seasons and day-to-day living. Yet it does far more than either, and, though not written with a clear social aim, reaches out to social considerations untouched in Mary Barton and North and South. Her last novel it certainly is, cut short just before its end by her sudden and early death at fifty-six years old, yet one must feel that Elizabeth Gaskell, like Jane Austen at her, even earlier, death, was far from the end of her career, and that Wives and Daughters, like Persuasion, shows a reaching-out to new and greater things. Wives and Daughters resembles Jane Austen’s novels in its materials, part of its form, and some of its techniques, but the likenesses account for little of its greatness, leaving one tempted to say that, like Fielding’s giants, it is ‘like nothing but itself. Such generalizations about resemblances can mislead the reader, blinkering him into seeing only what he expects to see, and leading him to minimize or ignore what is new in itself, or presented in ways quite new to the novel form.
