There is even less of the “evil stepsister” angle here that we are used to from our Cinderella fairy tale days - Molly and Cynthia form an instant sisterly bond that only grows stronger as time passes and it is their relationship that is the real highlight of the book. This makes it very difficult for Molly to really respect her stepmother, and she finds her very wearying at times, but she puts up with it in good spirit - helped enormously by the fact that her stepmother has a daughter, Cynthia, whom Molly takes to right away. Gibson is far from being the “evil stepmother” that is almost a caricature in most stories when the father remarries, but she is somewhat of an airhead, with not much sense, intelligence, and depth of character - all of which Molly has in abundance. This tranquil state of affairs is completely upended when her father gets remarried. Her mother died when she was very young, but she still leads a very happy life, adored by everyone in the town, with many friends of her mother who watch out for her, and a very close and loving relationship with her father, who is a highly respected doctor. Wives and Daughters is centered around the life of Molly Gibson, a young girl living with her widowed father in a small English town in the 1830s. Wives and Daughters was Gaskell’s last novel before her sudden death in 1865 in fact, she was not able to finish it and it was completed by another writer of that time. After being introduced to North and South, a Victorian classic novel by Elizabeth Gaskell that I absolutely loved, I picked up Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, hoping that it would assuage the withdrawal symptoms I was suffering from after finishing North and Southand looking for another book that could inspire the same level of emotion.

Wives and daughters book