Wives and Daughters (Annotated)

Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters is a richly textured novel of provincial English life, centred on Molly Gibson's moral education amid the households, marriages, ambitions, and quiet betrayals of Hollingford. Written with lucid realism, social comedy, and psychological delicacy, it belongs to the Victorian tradition of the domestic novel while subtly revising it: courtship is less a convent...