Wives and Daughters (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) FROM OUR EDITORS
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FROM THE PUBLISHER
Tremendously popular in her lifetime, Elizabeth Gaskell has often
been overshadowed by her contemporaries the Brontës and George
Eliot. Yet the reputation of her long-neglected masterpiece Wives and
Daughters continues to grow, fulfilling Henry James’s prophecy
that the novel would “continue for years to come to be read and
relished . . .so delicately, so elaborately, so artistically, so
truthfully, and heartily is the story wrought out.”
An enchanting tale of romance, scandal, and intrigue in the gossipy
English town of Hollingford around the 1830s, Wives and Daughters
tells the story of Molly Gibson, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a
widowed country doctor. When her father remarries, she forms a close
friendship with her new stepsister—the beautiful and worldly
Cynthia—until they become love rivals for the affections of Squire
Hamley’s sons, Osbourne and Roger. When sudden illness and death
reveal some secrets while shrouding others in even deeper mystery, Molly
feels that the world is out of joint and it is up to her—trusted by
all but listened to by none—to set it right.
Amy M. King is Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s
University in New York City and the author of Bloom: The Botanical
Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford University Press, 2003).