Except perhaps for the somewhat telescoped ending, which some critics regard as an indication of inartistic haste, Sylvia's Lovers shows a remarkable degree of unity, its various strands skilfully interwoven within an overall framework. In its thematic linking of the personal and the public and its carefully contextualized psychological complexity, it gives the impression of a highly mature and considered work.

II

Sylvia's Lovers belongs to a fictional genre popular in the early and mid nineteenth century – the historical novel, or novel in which conscious retrospect forms the narrative framework. Examples of this genre contemporary with Gaskell's work include Thackeray's The Virginians (1857–9), Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), the last of which Gaskell was actually reading on the Whitby holiday and about which she wrote in admiration to its author. Like all such fiction, her novel operates within a ‘then' and ‘now' parameter, and Gaskell constantly draws attention to this dichotomy. In describing the Foster brothers' shop, for instance, she remarks about the projecting lower windows, ‘These openings had long been filled with panes of glass that at the present day would be accounted very small, but which seventy years ago were much admired for their size' (pp. 25–6). More ironically, in observing how the Monkshaven parishioners accept the inadequacies of their vicar, she remarks:

In looking back to the last century, it appears curious to see how little our ancestors had the power of putting two things together, and perceiving either the discord or harmony thus produced. Is it because we are farther off from those times, and have, consequently, a greater range of vision?… But such discrepancies ran through good men's lives in those days. It is well for us that we live at the present time, when everybody is logical and consistent. [p. 66]

A diachronic notion of ‘progress' or ‘improvement' may be illusory, she implies.

By the time that she was writing, fears of social revolution in England, fuelled by the unrest on the Continent during the 1840s (and referred to in Mary Barton and North and South) had largely disappeared, but the individual's relation to authority and to ever-growing institutional and state power remained as much a matter of concern as ever. It is perhaps not coincidental that John Stuart Mill's treatise on these questions, On Liberty, was also published in 1859, although it is uncertain whether or not Gaskell actually read it. In setting her story in the 1790s against a background of disruptive events, Gaskell is reminding her readers of the fragility of social equilibrium and the constant tensions between duty and desire, and between adherence to preconstructed codes and the assertion of individual autonomy. These tensions are problematized even more acutely because sited in a period and region of greater lawlessness than Gaskell's present, an arena where personal will and ideological restraint are more crudely opposed, and, as she frequently points out, less mediated by introspection or self-analytical debate.

The framing events of the novel exist on two levels – national (the Napoleonic wars) and local (the press-gang activities in Monkshaven). The two are consequentially linked: it is because of the wars on the Continent that impressment must be used to obtain more sailors for battle service. They are also linked in terms of narrative structure: the operations of the press-gang both take Kinraid away and precipitate Daniel Robson's fatal intervention, leaving Sylvia broken-spirited and defenceless against Philip's insistent courtship; the wars themselves not only provide Kinraid with the opportunity of raising his status but are also the means of reconciliation between him and Philip on the battlefield at Acre.

More importantly, the novel interconnects the historical and the personal, the public and the private. It is a story of basic human passions and individual choice, foregrounded within the compass of larger outer circumstances. Private behaviour, focusing on personal desire in conflict with restricting conditions, is paralleled by public events in which questions of general good are set against the anarchy of disruptive action. Significantly, the two come together most clearly in the often-criticized scenes at Acre in which Philip's rescue of the wounded Kinraid – a deed of reparation for his previous treachery – resonates against the larger-scale bravery enacted in Sir Sidney Smith's bold defence of the fort and eventual routing of the French forces. A similar, though differently orientated, parallel is evident in the sections concerning the press-gang, in which the lawlessness of personal outrage which erupts in vengeful violence is juxtaposed with the merciless operations of impressment which illegally seizes on protected whalemen. Here, of course, both occurrences are problematic, since each brings into question the degree to which the maintenance of hegemonic order can be justified at the expense of a more personal and humanely motivated value system.

As well as examining the interconnections between private and public within a historical framework, Gaskell develops her narrative concerns in the context of gender. Sylvia's Lovers is as much about personal relationships as about historical events. Indeed, in its penetrating analysis of marital disharmony and the competing pressures of duty and inclination within the sexual sphere, it foreshadows George Eliot's more extensive study of the same themes in Middlemarch, written seven years later. From this angle, not only does the retrospective temporality of Gaskell's novel remind readers of the changed – and changing – roles of men and women, with a mediating narrator negotiating between past and present, but the gendered differences of behaviour are examined through the intersection of individual action and historical forces.

In her textual representation of these differences, Gaskell anticipates later psychoanalytical and feminist theorists who argue for a gender specific (though not necessarily biologically essentialist) temporality: ‘male' time as a linear dimension, a striving towards some predetermined aim or plan which is progressive and finite; ‘female' time as a more subjective process, cyclical and repetitious, linked to bodily rhythms and encompassing a dimension of infinity.

Gaskell's portrayal of character and its relation to outer processes reflects these distinctions. In the novel, men are involved in the linear temporality of history – war, politics and public events; they drive towards finality or conclusion, assured of a knowable and finite causal connection between act and consequence. Women, in contrast, exist in a non-conclusive, non-linear dimension, signalled by privacy and by their exclusion from the external world of action. This is not shown as a fixed opposition: the emphasis in the novel on the natural world and the cyclical movement of the seasons, as well as the way in which patterns of male and female behaviour shift and overlap, suggests an essentially harmonizing view, a belief in accommodation and reconciliation. Nevertheless, in contrasting gender roles and characteristics, Gaskell is foregrounding ‘difference' both as an ideological construct and as a determining force.

The centrality of men in history is established in the first chapter, in the opening focus on the male occupation of whale fishing, and in the following section of the narrative which sets the story against the background of the Napoleonic wars and the consequent activities of the press-gang. By pointing to the strong link between sailors of all classes and the unified spirit of resistance to any infringement of personal liberty, Gaskell foregrounds the male-orientated world of action which operates according to a linear temporality. The notion of manly ‘doing' directed towards some specific end is most clearly articulated in Chapter IX, in which Charley Kinraid and Daniel Robson describe their whaling adventures in the Arctic, exploits based on real-life undertakings.20 It is also visually represented earlier in the novel, when Molly and Sylvia, on their way to town to sell their produce, stop to look at the view out to sea:

On this blue trackless water floated scores of white-sailed fishing boats, apparently motionless, unless you measured their progress by some land-mark; but still, and silent, and distant as they seemed, the consciousness that there were men on board, each going forth into the great deep, added unspeakably to the interest felt in watching them.