The characters in this affecting and magnificent tale of C19th village life are superbly imagined through exquisite, often very funny dialogue. The characters in this magnificent tale of village life in the 1830s are superbly imagined through exquisite, often very funny dialogue. Two girls are thrown together by the marriage of their widowed parents, the delightful, sardonic Mr Gibson and the insufferable Mrs Gibson – vain, flimsy, and self-serving… Mrs Gaskell loves her people, even the flawed, and her narrative, for all the smallness of the world depicted, is extraordinarily bewitching, absorbing, embracing.
