Before the parliamentary actions of the 1850s, the legal status of women in England was defined by the doctrine of “coverture,” which for the purposes of the law treated a woman as an object under the control (and responsibility) of her husband or father. Women were not subjects with rights and responsibilities, but can best be described as dependents. A husband or a father was responsible for his wife’s or daughter’s actions, and he controlled her property; the fact that women could not enter into contracts was but one of the inequities that women still suffered in the first half of the nineteenth century. Feminist agitation by women writers was instrumental in bringing issues such as child custody and the right to inherit property to the forefront. Elizabeth Gaskell was one of the most prominent signatories of the petition to Parliament (with some 25,000 signatures) that ultimately resulted in the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which enabled women to inherit, own, and bequeath property, as well as to enter into contracts and bring a suit in court (or be sued).

Gaskell’s novel registers the difference for women between the 1860s and the late 1820s in several ways, but most deeply in the father’s error in judgment that drives the novel: Mr. Gibson’s decision to acquire a second wife (and, as a result, a step-daughter) in order to provide a female presence for his then seventeen-year-old daughter. The notion that Molly needs to be protected from her emerging sexuality (and the resulting attention) through the propriety of a female chaperone/mother figure is subtly but persistently derogated by the novel, which determines that Molly’s character is in fact the strongest among the three women of the Gibson household, rather than one in need of protection. In other words, the concept that the father knows best how to protect his daughter—and that she needed to be protected, rather than consulted—is subtly critiqued, although never to the extent that the narrator intervenes to discourse upon the subject. On the contrary, the reader is left to figure out what to make of the combination that Dr. Gibson personifies: a generous and loving father who also calls his daughter “Goosey” and tells her suitor (but not her) that she has her own money The discussion of Molly’s education that takes place in the novel’s third chapter also provides some insight into the educational norms for (middle-class) women early in the century, which Gaskell subtly deprecates by making Molly’s later success dependent upon knowing a good deal more than her father—an informed and gentle man—thought necessary: “ ‘Don’t teach Molly too much: she must sew, and read, and write, and do her sums; but I want to keep her a child, and if I find more learning desirable for her, I’ll see about giving it to her myself. After all, I’m not sure that reading or writing is necessary. Many a good woman gets married with only a cross instead of her name; it’s rather a diluting of mother-wit, to my fancy, but, however, we must yield to the prejudices of society, Miss Eyre, and so you may teach the child to read’ ” (p. 34). Molly’s insistence that she be educated—eventually the father yields and allows her also to study French, dance, and drawing—and her later studies in natural history are ways in which the novelist subtly discriminates between the ideas of the older and newer generations.

Other differences that Gaskell registers about the changed status of women include the difference in education of the working classes. In the first chapter, the narrator alludes to a school for the working-class girls of the village: “She and the ladies, her daughters, had set up a school; not a school after the manner of schools nowadays, where far better intellectual teaching is given to the boys and girls of labourers and work-people than often falls to the lot of their betters in worldly estate; but a school of the kind we should call ‘industrial’” (p. 7). Gaskell is clearly marking a distinction between “then” and “now,” though her sense of the improvement in education for the poor “nowadays” is perhaps somewhat idealistic, considering that state-sponsored education was not established until the 1870s. The novel’s period of the late twenties was a threshold: a moment just prior to such things as the railway age, the penny post, Catholic emancipation, the extension of the vote, and the accession to the throne of Queen Victoria in 1837. It was, moreover, the real remembered world of Gaskell’s childhood, for even though the novel is set in the Midlands, Hollingford is clearly based on her childhood home in Knutsford, Cheshire, for which she retained an affection throughout her life.

 

Wives and Daughters attempts to capture pre-Victorian country society at multiple levels, including the upper, middle, and working classes, and to capture the internal hierarchies within each of those class positions. Gaskell’s capacity for the detail makes her exceptionally capable of rendering the texture of the everyday and the nuances of social life. The subtitle of Wives and Daughters is “An Every-Day Story,” which at once announces the novel’s ambition and strategically asserts its verisimilitude. After all, if it is a story about the “everyday” rather than the “exceptional,” then it is a story about the real rather than the fantastic; of course, the novel is simply a fully imagined fictional world, but one in which the reader is encouraged to believe as “real” and eventually cannot help but do so. The subject matter—Holling—ford, Molly Gibson—is deliberately restricted, which makes it possible for a slowly unfolding narrative procedure to enact the world under consideration, effectively bodying forth a sense of its realness in its sheer dedication to details and commonplace (rather than exceptional) moments. As such, you will notice that the narrator is not particularly intrusive, and especially not declarative. You might contrast this narrative style with Jane Austen’s; Austen’s narrative voice has a considerably more authoritative tact, and her arguments are achieved via narrative assertions or Socratic-like debates between characters. The ideas that the reader takes in when reading Gaskell are unfolded rather than stated, as they are more likely to be in (for instance) the novels of George Eliot. Gaskell’s narrative style is subtle, one in which important facts unfold quietly in the form of self-reflexive analysis by characters. The “every-day story” of Molly Gibson’s coming of age in Hollingford in the late 1820s is, of course, a narrative ruse. By making Molly—a character at the center of the ordinary and the everyday whose subjectivity as a young woman on the threshold of the marrying age makes her interesting and even worthy of a story—the focus of the narrative, the novelist is able to dramatize that which is essentially unnarratable: everyday life.

The nuances of social life in Hollingford demand the reader’s attention throughout the novel. One of Gaskell’s talents as a novelist is the evocation of the internal hierarchies and distinctions among and between the various classes.