Wives and Daughters

A country doctor's daughter gains a stepmother, a stepsister with a secret engagement, and a place in a great house where the squire's son is expected to marry money. Gaskell died at her desk with the last instalment unwritten, and the magazine published her editor's note explaining how the story was to have ended. It is her best book: the small deceits are traced so exactly that the reader forgives everybody except the person the plot forgives. Forty-two plates after Constable, Wilkie, Morland and their contemporaries, from cottage interiors and grace before meat to the Salisbury water meadows, keep the quiet English world of the novel steadily in view.