Resisting the urge to punch Molly Gibson

I finally finished Wives and Daughters. It was a bit of a slog, I'm not going to lie. The language is very dense and whole chapters went by where it seemed as though the only plot development was a character's foreshadowing sneeze. I've complained before of the level of description, and that did not change in the second half of the book.

Overall, I actually enjoyed this book more than I expected. The characters are mostly endearing and there is something about the novel that pulls you in and makes it fairly easy to keep reading. You are just shocked after several hours of reading to find yourself not very much farther than you were when you started.

However, I did have some major personal issues with this novel as a whole. I know it's a classic and rightly so, but by the end I just wanted to smack little Molly Gibson upside the head! She is such a Pollyanna, as my dad would say. Characters fall all over themselves to describe how sweet and demure she is, but she spends half the novel completely senseless to what is going on around her. Half the time she is so empathetic and manages to provide exactly the kind word that is needed at the right time, and the other half she has no idea that men are in love with her and that her step-sister is boy-crazy. She's described as intelligent, but we're never given any real example to back this up. Granted, she's not in a society that provided many opportunities for display of female intelligence, but Lady Harriet took up far less page space and cut a much more impressive figure in this way. In the end I think I liked Cynthia, the step-sister, better, simply because she was self-aware. She might have jilted multiple lovers and flirted with every Y chromosome in site, but at least she knew what she was about and wasn't easily fooled by others. But of course, we're not supposed to like her.

This book almost felt like Tess of the D'Urbervilles or The Woman in White, where male authors put their personal stamp on how they define female virtue (while also beating you over the head with obvious symbolism). But Wives and Daughters was written by a woman! And an intelligent, independent woman at that. Elizabeth Gaskell was great friends with Charlotte Bronte, but scrawny Jane Eyre could have whooped little Molly's Victorian tush!

Alright I think that is enough feminist venting. I was just surprised that Wives and Daughters, often described as Elizabeth Gaskell's finest work, would waste so much time on such a mousy character. Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen, suffers from the same sort of heroine problem, but very few critics would claim it was Ms. Austen's finest work. I am now more excited to read North and South for comparison. Based on the mini-series, I can't imagine that Margaret Hale will come across quite as pathetic as Molly Gibson... or at least I hope not.

One other interesting point about Wives and Daughters - there were a lot of references in conversations that made no sense. The handy footnotes in my edition explained most of these as nods to current plays or Victorian inside jokes. There was also a lot of random French. I can only imagine what readers 50-100 years from now will think of the modern references in a book like Bridget Jones' Diary.

Overall, I give this book a 6 out of 10. English literature lovers everywhere are horrified.

I started another book while I was reading Wives and Daughters, just to give me a sense of accomplishment. The Tombs of Atuan is short and geared toward younger readers, so I was getting disheartened at my slow pace through the Hollingford social whirl, I could plop down and read 10 pages in 5 minutes and get a sense of progress. I should finish that up in the next couple days and, after that, I am on to......

#15. Kitchen Confidential.

Well that ought to be quite a change of pace.