Wives And Daughters

 Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

When young Molly is invited to visit a neighbouring family for a few days, her father, Dr. Gibson, permits it, and so begins a relationship between the two families which will have consequences happy and sad for both.

Molly and her father are alone since her mother’s death and Molly grows attached to Mrs. Hamley. With the Hamley's sons away at school, they delight in the youthful energy Molly brings to their home again. 

When Mr. Hamley remarks to the doctor that Molly should have a mother to guide her as she grows to womanhood, he takes the advice seriously and begins looking around. The pickings are slim but he chooses a local widow, Mrs. Kirkpatrick, whom he believes will be a good mother to his daughter, and so, much to Molly's dismay, they are married. His choice turns out to be less than ideal but they all muddle along as best they can.

Clare Kirkpatrick brings with her to the marriage a daughter, the beautiful Cynthia, who doesn’t always make the wisest decisions but usually means well and becomes a much loved sister to Molly. When the Hamley boys, Osborne and Roger, come home from school, one is concealing from his father the fact that he has married a girl his family would never approve of and that they are expecting a child, and the other embarks on an ill-fated romance with one of the Gibson girls. The unexpected death of one of the young people affects both families deeply, but by the end of the book they all sort themselves out and Molly gets the happy ending the reader wants her to have.

I thoroughly enjoyed this and would have loved it for its language and narration even if it hadn’t had a good story. The audio version I listened to was nearly 27 hours long but was so beautifully read by Josephine Bailey that I wished there was more of it. I love the elegance of nineteenth century English in novels written before we started filling them with slang and swear words and such. It was a relief and a joy to sink into this one and hear it spoken with such grace.