Wives and daughters

Following notice at reference 1, I have now finished the first reading of Mrs Gaskell's 'Wives and daughters'. A long book at 650 pages and 60 chapters, but a very good one, despite not being quite finished at the time of the author's death.

A portrayal of family life in far greater detail than I recall from either George Eliot or Tolstoy, whose novels now seem rather grander than this one, but rather more removed from life - while Gaskell is content to show us life as the muddle of mistakes, misunderstandings and silly vanities which it mostly is. Perhaps I ought to go back to George Eliot to recover my balance - but time will tell on that one.

A good production from Penguin Classics, with just about the right amount of apparatus - in the way of introduction, notes and so forth - for this reader. Originally published by the Cornhill Magazine, 1864-1866, in eighteen monthly parts, mostly of three chapters each.

The snap is the full version of the detail from the front cover offered previously, turned up at Pinterest by Bing on the search key 'three ladies in a drawing room pieter christoffel wonder'. Given the dates of the painter, it may well be the right period, that is to say first half of the nineteenth century, but it struck me as a bit grand for the drawing room of the wives and daughters which are the subject of the present book. Rather as the settings of television adaptations tend to be a bit grander than the originals. Oddly, the snap seems red-brown on my laptop, more orange-yellow on the much larger screen attached to my desktop. And who knows what the original might be like. Yet another obscure quirk of image processing.

Earlier this morning, searching the blog archive for 'Gaskell', I found just the one mention, that at reference 2, which led back to the equally irrelevant reference 3 - beyond being a reminder that the author was a child of the north. But search notwithstanding, I knew that there was more and turned up reference 1 by hand.

It turns out that I fell foul of the omission by Windows search of files on OneDrive which happen to be offline. Forced them online by opening them in Word - there must be a better way of doing this but I don't know of it - and Windows search then found reference 1 immediately. So its indexer works fast enough when it does work.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/11/gaskell-redux.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/08/bob-of-lynn.html.

Reference 3: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=isabella+castile.