Two years ago, almost to the date, I graduated from high school. In celebration of said graduation, I received a lot of cash, checks, gift cards, chocolate… basically every form of currency you can think of (except salt, and sea shells—nobody gave me any of those). But here and there mixed in with the money were actual presents, most memorably a 4-foot-long bamboo shoot full of ants and a really, really scary looking book. Hallmark Valentine’s Day pink and a good two inches thick, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters did not look like the sort of book I wanted to pick up for pre-college summer reading. At all.
So it sat on my bookshelf for two years, almost to the date, before I picked it up and just started reading. I, as a rule, ignore introductions to classics written by anyone other than the author (they often give things away) and, if possible, any summary of it on anything from the library website to the dust jacket (which tend to contain sentences like ‘[Title Character] is a woman who has an affair, loses her child, and then, in despair, throws herself under a train.’ thanks for ruining everything). O, that I had read the dust jacket of Wives and Daughters! Then I would have known that the author died about 4 chapters short of finishing the already-650-page-monstrosity! But I didn’t read the dust jacket until I was about 500 pages in, which is way too late to give up even if you know you’re going to be disappointed at the end.
Anyway. Aside from my frustration at making it through without totality of resolution, I enjoyed this novel. Elizabeth Gaskell tends to be shoved behind the curtain of her contemporaries (she lived and wrote after Jane Austen and slightly before the Bronte sisters and George Eliot), but her writing style is engaging and quietly witty, if not as pithy as Austen or quotable as Eliot.
Most of Gaskell’s success is not in the minutiae of wordsmithy. Rather, she does what terribly few authors even attempt to do, and paints reasonable, fully-fleshed portraits of women as they exist in normal life, and in relationships with other women not revolving around men. Think about it. How many female friendships do you see in literature where the driving concern in everybody’s conversation is not their respective love lives? Granted, Gaskell goes there eventually, but in 650 pages there’s a lot of room for discussion of other things.
I will admit right now: there is not much plot in this book. It’s all about these women and their relationships (which is why they could still publish it sans-last-four-chapters). I had planned to do a book-summary-like-post, but as that would be boring, instead have some disjointed reactions to the characters:
Molly Gibson, the protagonist, is probably the woman in literature whose personality is enough like mine that I feel like I ought to be like her, but far enough away from mine that this is an absolutely impossible endeavor. She’s altogether good; there is no other way to put it. She does nothing spectacularly heroic (hence, ‘enough like me’), but she is also perpetually gentle and never does anything spectacularly—or slightly—selfish, annoying, or, um, wrong (hence, ‘impossible endeavor’). You may be thinking, ‘But Katie! You said Gaskell’s portraits were reasonable!’ Okay, so maybe she’s a little flat. But she isn’t perfect… she is occasionally manipulative, often anxious, and always naïve. Still. I’d say impossible.
I think the book would have failed if not for Molly’s relationship with her stepsister, Cynthia. Cynthia is a brilliantly drawn character (no flatness whatsoever, and rather a lot of sarcasm for the 1830s), and the genuine/realistically rocky friendship that comes out of two 17-year-old girls thrown together does not seem forced or contrived. And they don’t just talk about boys all the time. I’m still amazed. Gaskell compares Molly and Cynthia to Una and Duessa, respectively, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I was not to have to look at the footnotes to understand what she was talking about! Yay pre-1700 English classes! #nerdjoy
The best part of Wives and Daughters, though, is Molly’s stepmother. Oh my goodness. She’s worse than Mrs. Bennett. She is somehow simultaneously vapid and conniving, careless and meddling, and (as you might expect from such a character) constantly contradicting herself. Out of the whole book, the only quote I felt compelled to record on my index card bookmark was regarding her:
Her words were always like ready-made clothes, and never fitted individual thoughts.Her speech is full of platitudes and half-lies. She is the perfect semi-modern evil stepmother. She is so insecure and manipulative that by the end you positively loathe her, even though you’re sure she’s useful for something. She’s shrewd and dresses well, at least.
So yes, there’s that. I would recommend reading it, if you don't mind the disappointing non-ending. It's fairly light, and the characters are interesting and relatable, but you can still appear super intellectual reading it in public... if only because it's old and nobody has ever heard of Elizabeth Gaskell.
What have I learned from this book?
- Don’t die 93% of the way through writing a novel.
- Read the dust jacket if the book is over 200 pages long.
- A good book doesn’t need an exciting plot.
- Women don’t only talk about men, even in early 19th century literature.
um, the end.
