Wives and Daughters

While everyone was sitting around the big flat screen t.v in our living room watching the Superbowl I was huddled around the computer with my earphones plugged in watching the 1999 BBC miniseries Wives and Daughters. I watched a fan made trailer on youtube and decided that I would watch the show and BOY am I glad I did :] It was good. Wives and Daughters is a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell (author of North and South). It was unfinished at the time of her death in November 1865.

Known as her last, longest, and perhaps finest work, it concerns the interlocking fortunes of several families in the country town of Hollingford. Wives and Daughters chronicles the maturation of Molly Gibson, a sincere young woman whose widowed father, the town doctor, marries Hyacinth Kirkpatrick, a charming but petty widow and former governess in the household of Lord Cumnor. Although Molly resents her stepmother, she befriends her stepsister Cynthia, who is secretly engaged to Lord Cumnor's land agent, Mr. Preston. Molly is warmly received at the home of Squire Hamley and his disabled wife. The Hamleys' two sons are Osborne and Roger, both seen as potential husbands for Molly and Cythia.