Mrs. Gaskell confessed to having taken greater pains with Sylvia’s Lovers than with any other of her novels, and this historical story is one of her best and marks a second stage in her work. It is a story founded on fact in the cruel press-gang days, and Mrs. Gaskell has been wonderfully successful in her delineation of the characters. She does not try to make them perfect, but describes them with their flaws, and there is no exaggeration but just the unvarnished conversation natural to the people of the period with which the story deals. The descriptive parts are most perfectly rendered, and it was a high tribute to Mrs. Gaskell’s faithful word-painting when Du Maurier was led to use actual sketches of Whitby to help him in illustrating Sylvia’s Lovers before he knew that Monkshaven and Whitby were one and the same place. Some of the scenes are exquisitely drawn, and Mrs. Gaskell rose to her highest in word portraiture in Sylvia’s Lovers. The sailor’s funeral in the old God’s Acre around the ancient Parish Church is a masterpiece. The New Year’s Party at Moss Brow and Philip Hepburn going out into the darkness on that memorable night show a wonderful insight into human nature. The last scene, where Philip and Sylvia meet only to part again when it is too late, is a pathetic picture that few could have painted with such soul-stirring emotion.
Cousin Phillis is a prose idyll, which for beauty of language and wealth of original incidents is unique—“A gem without a flaw”—and one of the most perfect stories of old-world romance, fitted in the rich setting of her grandfather Holland’s picturesque farm at Sandlebridge, near Knutsford. It is a story to be read over and over again. The heroine, Phillis Holman, is one of the most perfectly sketched characters in any English novel, and yet there is nothing overdrawn, all is simple, quiet, and dignified, and withal so real and faithful to life. Though not as well-known as Cranford, Cousin Phillis richly deserves to hang side by side with it as a miniature of great beauty, in soft subdued colours. The story is surrounded by the atmosphere of the practical, religious home-life of the godly family at Hope Farm, which surely owes something to Mrs. Gaskell’s own kinsfolk.
This story was quickly succeeded by what, alas, became Mrs. Gaskell’s last and notably her best work, Wives and Daughters. She calls it an everyday story, and yet it grips the reader from the beginning to the end. The heroine is a typical well-bred English girl, who endears herself to her readers by her natural simplicity and common sense. The story is of Knutsford once more, and it takes us to the well-wooded parks and lordly mansions on the outskirts of the village. Those who knew the Knutsford of the fifties were wont to say how true to life it was. The characters are drawn with a master hand. Molly Gibson and Cynthia Kirkpatrick are a splendid study in contrasts, and Mrs. Gaskell’s powers were never more fully taxed, nor does she ever succeed so well, except perhaps when she draws Cynthia’s mother, the stepmother of Molly and the second Mrs. Gibson.
The book is nearly related to Cranford, for this story of Wives and Daughters is of the near kinsfolk of the Cranford dames. Though the novelist touches lightly the foibles and failings of Mrs. Gibson, she shows her clear insight and reads character with shrewdness, albeit so kindly.
Mrs. Gibson and Cynthia Kirkpatrick are worthy of Thackeray himself, and possibly owe something to his influence. Both characters are difficult to delineate, and in the hands of a less capable writer we should have despised and disliked them, but with the kindly benevolent spirit which shines through all Mrs. Gaskell’s works, we are driven to make allowances and pity their shallowness whilst smiling at the worldly wisdom displayed. How different would they have been revealed by George Eliot, and with what merciless scorn would Charlotte Brontë have treated them. “Molly Gibson is the best heroine you have had yet,” wrote Madame Mohl. She is certainly a cousin to Margaret Hale in North and South and a sister to Phillis Holman in Cousin Phillis. This type of English girlhood suited Mrs. Gaskell’s pen. Her heroines are generally better drawn than her heroes, which may be accounted for to some extent by the fact that she viewed everything from a woman’s standpoint, and that during the whole of her literary life she had the companionship of her own devoted daughters, well educated, happy, and like their mother, always anxious to do the right. Molly Gibson’s character has always been associated with Mrs. Gaskell’s own girlhood, but quite recently I received a letter from the grandson of one of Mrs. Gaskell’s school friends at Stratford-on-Avon, and he tells me that he was always given to understand that his grandmother was the prototype of Molly Gibson. Truly Mrs. Gaskell’s characters in many of her stories fit many originals, hence her determination to class them as “everyday stories,” though, as a matter of fact, they are probably not drawn from any one individual.
Mrs. Gaskell has suffered more than most writers from being accused of putting real people into her stories, but though imagination is a great quality, it is not more essential than the power to recognise and handle the simple facts of life; for while there are many who can create a character, few can faithfully delineate it, and the same is true of locality.
Before the concluding chapter of Wives and Daughters was finished the pen dropped from the novelist’s hand, just when she was at the zenith of her power as a writer. This novel was written as a serial for the Cornhill Magazine when Mr. Frederick Greenwood was editor. The latter part was written at Pontresina during the summer of 1865, when Mrs. Gaskell was travelling with her son-in-law, Mr. Charles Compton, Q.C., and her three daughters. She returned to Manchester in June, and was far from well. During the whole of her literary life she had been longing for a pied-à-terre in the country, where she could get the necessary quiet for her work. The North of England was too cold in the winter, though in the summer she found a delightful spot on Morecambe Bay—a little old-world village which is known by the euphonious name of Silverdale. There for a part of many summers she went with her daughters and her faithful nurse to a farm which is accurately described in Ruth. Silverdale lives as Abermouth in that noble story.
The country home which Mrs. Gaskell chose was known as The Lawn, Holybourne, near Alton, in Hampshire. She purchased it with the two thousand pounds which she received for Wives and Daughters, and she kept the secret from her husband, meaning to present it to him when it was altered and renovated to her own artistic taste. But alas! before it was completed she suddenly passed away on Sunday afternoon, November 14th, 1865. She had been feeling really better, and on that very Sunday attended service at the quaint old church at Holybourne in company with her daughters, when, during tea, without a moment’s warning her head lowered and she was gone. Writing of this sad time, one of her daughters wrote: “Mama’s last days had been full of loving thought and tender help for others. She was so sweet and dear and noble beyond words.”
Wives and Daughters was all but finished. She was waiting for some special information with regard to one of the characters, Roger Hamley, who, along with his brother Osborne, made an admirable pair to match Molly Gibson and Cynthia Kirkpatrick, before she concluded the story. The very last words that Mrs. Gaskell wrote are: “And now cover me up close, and let me go to sleep and dream about my dear Cynthia and my new shawl.” One who loved Mrs. Gaskell dearly said it would not be inappropriate to alter the words Cynthia to husband and new shawl to new house, for during her stay at Holybourne her thoughts were often with her husband, the busy Unitarian minister in Manchester, and she was looking forward “with the glee of a child” to giving him a country home in the South of England, to which she hoped he would retire with her, though she looked forward to many years of usefulness both for herself and her husband.
The brief stay at Holybourne, with its tragic ending, was a sad memory for the husband and daughters. The house is still in the possession of the family. The intended gift which the mother bought so cheerfully has been kept as a last token of love, though the family never resided there after Mrs. Gaskell’s death.