Wives and Daughters was Mrs Gaskell's last novel, and was not quite finished at her death. Francis Greenwood, then editor of the Cornhill Magazine, provided 'Concluding Remarks' based on Mrs Gaskells's comments to her daughter Meta on how she intended the book to end.
The book was serialised in the Cornhill Magazine August 1864 to January 1866, and first published in England by Smith Elder and Co. in 1866. The story is about the romances of Molly Gibbons and her father, stepsister, and two sons of the local squire; all set against a background of rigidly enforced 'stations in life' and 'nervous illness'. It is the least religious of Mrs Gaskell's writings.
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