Wives and Daughters Study Guide

Elizabeth Gaskell was an English author who published several short story collections as well as eight novels. As a novelist, Gaskell once fell into obscurity but has since regained esteem as a writer whose work often went against the prevailing social attitudes of its time, including championing workers’ and women’s rights. Gaskell’s father was a Unitarian minister. After Gaskell’s mother died when she was 13 months old, Gaskell’s father sent her to live with an aunt in Knutsford, a rural hamlet in Cheshire, England. In 1932, Gaskell married a Unitarian minister, William Gaskell, and the two moved to Manchester. Struck by the hardships of those in poverty, Gaskell wrote her first novel, Mary Barton, about a working-class family in Manchester. Critics and writers lavished praise on that novel. One of Gaskell’s most prominent admirers was Charles Dickens. Gaskell then went on to publish several stories and multiple novels in the magazine that Dickens edited, Household Words, including her novels Cranford and North and South. Gaskell also befriended the author Charlotte Brontë. Two years after Brontë’s death, Gaskell published the first biography of Brontë, titled The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Many people consider Gaskell’s final novel, Wives and Daughters, one of her finest works.

The opening pages of Wives and Daughters state that the action of the novel occurs before the passing of the “Reform Bill,” referring to the Reform Act of 1832. That Act, passed by the Whig-controlled government of the time, vastly expanded the right to vote to include people who owned smaller amounts of land, tenant farmers, shopkeepers, and those who paid a yearly rental fee equal to £10. Gaskell considered Charles Darwin a relative, and the two admired each other’s work. In Wives and Daughters, the character of Roger is reportedly loosely based on Charles Darwin. Roger’s expedition notably lines up roughly with the chronology of Darwin’s voyage that led to one of his first prominent books, The Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1839. Darwin left for that voyage in December of 1831. Like Roger’s expedition, Darwin’s trip was supposed to be for two years but ended up lasting for five. When Darwin returned from the voyage, he was already well-known in England for the specimens that he had collected and sent back, similar to Roger. While the characters in Wives and Daughters operate within the established gender norms of Victorian England, Gaskell’s novel also challenges many of the defining features of that society, namely the idea that men should be granted more power and opportunities than women. In that way, Gaskell’s work can be seen as an early example of work advocating for women’s rights in England. One of the first such works was Mary Shelley’s essay A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792. The first organized group of women fighting for suffrage formed in the 1850s, and, in June 1866, another group presented Parliament with a petition calling for Parliament to grant the right to vote to women. That petition was unsuccessful, and women didn’t gain the right to vote in England under the same conditions as men until 1928. Similarly, Cambridge University (which Roger and Osborne attend in the novel) first admitted women in 1869, but the university didn’t grant degrees to women until 1948.

Gaskell wrote seven other novels, many of which share similar social themes with Wives and Daughters, including themes advocating for women’s and workers’ rights. Aside from Wives and Daughters, some of Gaskell’s most well-known novels include Cranford and North and South. Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, caught the attention of Charles Dickens, and Gaskell went on to publish several stories in Dickens’s magazine, Household Words. She also serially published three novels in that magazine, including Cranford, North and South, and My Lady Ludlow. Some of Dickens’s most renowned novels include A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Bleak House. Gaskell also befriended the writer Charlotte Brontë, whose celebrated novel is Jane Eyre. Two years after Brontë’s death, Gaskell published the first biography of Brontë. In that book, titled The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell lovingly paid tribute to her friend, and the biography continues to be critically lauded to this day. Gaskell’s work is also often compared to her contemporary George Eliot, whose novels include Middlemarch, Silas Marner, and The Mill on the Floss. Jane Austen’s novels, including Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, are also considered some of the primary influences on Gaskell’s work.