Wives and Daughters

We know that Roger Hamley will marry Molly, and that is what we are most concerned about. Indeed, there was little else to tell. Had the writer lived, she would have sent her hero back to Africa forthwith.

Molly's growth, Cynthia's secret, Osborne's hidden marriage, and Roger's deferred courtship fuse into provincial comedy; the editor's Concluding Remarks supply intended closure the author did not live to write, so plot scores 88.

Roger was two years younger than Osborne; clumsy and heavily built, like his father; his face was square, and the expression grave, and rather immobile. He was good, but dull, his schoolmasters said. He won no prizes, but brought home a favourable report of his conduct.

Molly, Cynthia, Roger, Osborne, and the Squire are warmly individuated — honest Molly against dazzling Cynthia and the Hamley brothers — without flattening into type only, so cast scores 91.

To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to get up.

Sixty serial chapters with Hamley domestic interludes; the Cynthia crisis accelerates but the Hollingford rhythm dominates rather than thriller tempo, so pace scores 85.

On the drawers opposite to the little white dimity bed in which Molly Gibson lay, was a primitive kind of bonnet-stand on which was hung a bonnet, carefully covered over from any chance of dust with a large cotton handkerchief, of so heavy and serviceable a texture that if the thing underneath it had been a flimsy fabric of gauze and lace and flowers, it would have been altogether "scomfished."

Gaskell's late prose — Molly's bonnet at dawn, the Squire smoking with Roger — fuses scientific curiosity with domestic comedy, so prose scores 89.

At one side lay the little town of Hollingford, into a street of which Mr. Gibson's front door opened; and delicate columns, and little puffs of smoke were already beginning to rise from many a cottage chimney where some housewife was already up, and preparing breakfast for the bread-winner of the family.

Hollingford, Hamley Hall, and the Towers form a north-country gentry ecosystem where natural history and marriage plots coexist, so world scores 88.

Molly Gibson saw all this, but all she thought about it was, "Oh! it will be a fine day! I was afraid it never, never would come; or that, if it ever came, it would be a rainy day!"

Molly wide awake on gala morning, longing for her first party bonnet — inviting in provincial girlhood rather than shock, so hook scores 87.

If Roger did not do well at Cambridge, he was to be a farmer on his own account; if he did well, he was to be a barrister, or a doctor, or anything else the Squire had done himself for many a year. So Roger followed his brother to Cambridge.

Roger the naturalist against Osborne the poet — science and sentiment as rival Hamley masculinities — anticipates Victorian debates on vocation, so innov scores 87.

Molly returned to her worsted-work, happy, glowing, sad, content, and thinking to herself how sweet is--friendship!

The manuscript breaks before Roger's proposal; Molly waves Roger off in friendship while the editor confirms their marriage — closure by reputation rather than authored scene, so ending scores 82.