Mrs. Gaskell has that rare quality in a novelist, charm. She draws you in by her natural story telling power. Season, scene, weather, parlour, the disposition of furniture, the work in hand of the ladies; all of this is laid out as in a narrative painting. Soon there will be tea and genteel gossip. Does that sound interminably dull? It isn’t, for each of the participants have a secret life with fears, schemes, hopes and vulnerability. Molly Gibson misses the companionship of her father which is subtly balked by the new wife, the widow Kirkpatrick.
Her husband is fondly remembered:
“When I look back to those happy days, it seems to me as if I had never valued them as I ought. To be sure—youth, love,—what did we care for poverty! I remember dear Mr. Kirkpatrick walking five miles into Stratford to buy me a muffin because I had such a fancy for one after Cynthia was born. I don't mean to complain of dear papa—but I don't think—but, perhaps I ought not to say it to you. If Mr. Kirkpatrick had but taken care of that cough of his; but he was so obstinate! Men always are, I think. And it really was selfish of him. Only I daresay he did not consider the forlorn state in which I should be left. It came harder upon me than upon most people, because I always was of such an affectionate sensitive nature. I remember a little poem of Mr. Kirkpatrick's, in which he compared my heart to a harpstring, vibrating to the slightest breeze."
The vapid self serving Hyacinth Kirkpatrick fading beauty ca.40, was a governess in the house of Lord Cumnor after the death of her husband. The Cumnor mansion is up the road from Hollingford village, scene of the novel and very much after the pattern of ‘Cornford’. The Cumnors set her up with a school for young ladies teaching them pianoforte, geography and French. She is delighted with her new role as a doctor’s wife and begins to fancy herself above the common run of the village ladies and their tea parties. County society for her.
Poor Dr. Gibson aged 50 or so had remarried in order to bring a chaperone into the house and to safeguard against relationships with the young men who are his resident apprentice surgeons. So he tells himself but his old bones will remain chilled.
“Mrs. Kirkpatrick accepted Mr. Gibson principally because she was tired of the struggle of earning her own livelihood; but she liked him personally—nay, she even loved him in her torpid way, and she intended to be good to his daughter, though she felt as if it would have been easier for her to have been good to his son.”
Cynthia her daughter is 19 and about two years older than Molly and they get on very well. Finely drawn sisterly relationship.
Of Cynthia:
"Cynthia was very beautiful, and was so well aware of this fact that she had forgotten to care about it; no one with such loveliness ever appeared so little conscious of it. Molly would watch her perpetually as she moved about the room, with the free stately step of some wild animal of the forest—moving almost, as it were, to the continual sound of music.”
Cynthia has a secret. Osborne Hamley, the squires’ eldest son has a secret. His brother Roger doesn’t have a secret but he’s a senior wrangler and a proto-evolutionist. The old squire is a classic curmudgeonly Tory who deplores Whigs, Catholics and the French. There are numerous characters all very humorously drawn. It’s a long novel but it clips along like the Doctor’s pacing horse. An excellent tonic which I recommend without reservation.
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