Available Formats
Paperback
Published: 15th September 2010
Paperback
Published: 7th January 2013
Paperback
Published: 30th May 1996
Paperback, New edition
Published: 5th November 1999
Wives and Daughters
By (Author) Elizabeth Gaskell
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
7th January 2013
29th November 2012
United Kingdom
Paperback
816
Width 128mm, Height 197mm, Spine 34mm
560g
The new paperback series- Penguin English Library "Eh, miss, but that be a rare young lady! She do have such pretty coaxing ways ..." Seventeen-year-old Molly Gibson worships her widowed father. But when he decides to remarry, Molly's life is thrown off course by the arrival of her vain, shallow and selfish stepmother. There is some solace in the shape of her new stepsister Cynthia, who is beautiful, sophisticated and irresistible to every man she meets. Soon the girls become close, and Molly finds herself cajoled into becoming a go-between in Cynthia's love affairs. But in doing so, Molly risks ruining her reputation in the gossiping village of Hollingford - and jeopardizing everything with the man she is secretly in love with.
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65) moved from the London of her childhood to Knutsford and later Manchester, and her experience of the differences between North and South deeply informed her writing. Writer of six novels, numerous shorter works and the biography of her great friend Charlotte Bronte, Gaskell was at first published anonymously but later in her own name. Much of her work was serialised in Charles Dickens's widely-read literary weekly, Household Words. Gaskell's other novels Mary Barton, Cranford and North and South are also published in the Penguin English Library.