Household Goodness: ‘Cousin Phillis’, Wives and Daughters

Abstract

Towards the end of her writing career, Gaskell gained a new sense of confidence in her work. ‘Cousin Phillis’ (1863–4) and Wives and Daughters, the enchanting ‘everyday story’ which she had not quite finished when she died, display a new and dazzling sureness of artistic control. Edgar Wright explains this development in terms of a move from direct authorial commentary to more impersonal narrative methods. In ‘Cousin Phillis’ the narrator is a major character in the story, and in Wives and Daughters the omniscient narrator withdraws to the background, leaving Molly Gibson, in Henry James’s terms, the ‘fine central intelligence’ that gives the novel a unified viewpoint. (As Wright points out, James admired Gaskell’s final novel).¹ This artistic development is sometimes assumed to entail a movement away from the social commitment of her earlier fiction.