Chapter 6 - Elizabeth Gaskell’s Everyday: Reverent Form and Natural Theology in Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) and Wives and Daughters (1866)

Summary

Chapter 6 focuses on Elizabeth Gaskell’s late long novels Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) and Wives and Daughters: An Everyday Story (1866). Our accounts of English provincial realism occasionally short-circuit these fictions because of Gaskell’s sometimes subtle and sometimes overt presentation of Christian theology; this chapter claims them within the genre of realism by focusing on their formal commonality with other realist novels and reverent natural history: the reverence for minute details and for the commonplace subject. Like natural history, Gaskell’s novels focus on, and show reverence for, the quotidian world and event; the chapter argues that behind the observation and rendering of the details of everyday reality there is reverence, and that the form of the novel (its “reverent form”) demonstrates a persistent religiosity. The chapter connects Gaskell to Charles Kingsley and explores her Unitarianism as illuminative of the presentation of the Quakerism and the overt natural theological references in Sylvia’s Lovers.