Recommendations
Books Like Wives and Daughters
Best books to read after Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
Readers who love Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell are drawn to its combination of the finest social comedy in Gaskell's work, the fully realized portrait of a Victorian country town and its inhabitants, and the contrast between Molly Gibson's steady and self-forgetful love and Cynthia Kirkpatrick's brilliant and fundamentally uncommitted charm. They want works that deal with the Victorian provincial social world, the country-town comedy, and the courtship novel organized around the competition between two women for the same man.
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North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
The companion — Margaret Hale and John Thornton. The companion as the more politically engaged and dramatically intense version of the same Gaskell investigation: where Wives and Daughters is organized around the social comedy of a country town, North and South is organized around the intellectual confrontation between the industrial North and the agricultural South
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's companion masterpiece — the social world of a Midlands provincial town. The companion as the nearest equivalent in English fiction: both novels are organized around the relationship between a woman of exceptional quality and the provincial world that both forms and limits her, and both achieve a Tolstoyan depth of social investigation
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Emma
by Jane Austen
Austen's companion — Emma Woodhouse in Highbury. The companion as the predecessor: both novels are organized around a social world seen through the eyes of an intelligent young woman, and both use the social comedy of a small English community to investigate the relationship between intelligence, self-knowledge, and the possibility of genuine love
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Mary Barton
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell's companion first novel — Manchester working class. The companion as the predecessor: where Wives and Daughters is organized around the social comedy of the middle-class provincial town, Mary Barton is organized around the suffering of the industrial working class in the same period, showing the full range of Gaskell's sympathetic imagination
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Cranford
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell's companion — the ladies of Cranford. The companion as the more concentrated and elegiac investigation of the same small English provincial world: where Wives and Daughters is organized around the full social comedy of Hollingford, Cranford is organized around the last survivors of the old order
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The Warden
by Anthony Trollope
Trollope's companion — the Barchester clergy and their social world. The companion as the male and clerical version of the same investigation: both novels are organized around a small English community in the mid-nineteenth century, and both investigate the relationship between the social world's ordinary comedy and the moral questions that underlie it
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The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
Eliot's companion — Maggie Tulliver's search for a life the world cannot give her. The companion as the more tragic version of the same provincial English world: Molly Gibson and Maggie Tulliver are companion figures — both daughters of limited but loving fathers, both in love with a man who initially chooses another woman
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Persuasion
by Jane Austen
Austen's companion — Anne Elliot's second chance at love. The companion as the investigation of the same quiet, reliable love that is overlooked in favor of more dazzling options: like Molly Gibson's love for Roger Hamley, Anne Elliot's love for Wentworth is the steady, faithful love that outlasts the brilliant alternatives
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