Wives and Daughters proved to be something of a departure for Gaskell. In many of her previous novels she had undertaken an examination of a social question such as the class disputes in Mary Barton or North and South, or the plight of a fallen woman and her illegitimate child in Ruth. From her earliest works her attention was always focused on the social and emotional problems of her women characters but in Wives and Daughters she writes a novel that is both a collection of brilliant character sketches which together form a novel about the joys and sorrows of the people of Hollingford, an…
