Wives and Daughters is a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, first published in the Cornhill Magazine as a serial from August 1864 to January 1866. When Mrs Gaskell died suddenly in 1865, it was not quite complete, and the last section was written by Frederick Greenwood. The story revolves around Molly Gibson, only daughter of a widowed doctor living in a provincial English town in the 1830s.

Product Description: Covers the Victorian period, bringing together a range of texts reflecting the role of women in an era when their cultural influence broadened as science, religious doubt, and the idea of the nation evolved as systems of cultural representation.

Social and literary historians recognise the 1790s as a moment of political crisis and turbulence in British history: the intense reactions in Britain to increasing revolutionary violence in France politicised almost every aspect of cultural life. The public sphere became the battleground of what Marilyn Butler terms 'the war of ideas'. At the centre of these discursive hostilities was the opposition between sentimentality, on the one hand, and rationality, on the other. Inextricably interlinked with these contrary values were notions of gender identity and class ideology. There was, however, no defining stabilisation of political or gender positions around the two values of sentiment and reason. Two of the most important literary forms utilised for expressing these discursive polemics were novels and treatises on education. A third equally significant and closely-related genre was that of conduct writing. Conduct Literature for Women IV, 1770-1830 makes available this body of writing, which has been less well studied in respect to the war of ideas than the former two. Yet, as the texts collected in this edition demonstrate, conduct writing was influentially engaged at the heart of the controversies that characterised the British public sphere during the critical decades across the turn of the century. Furthermore, looking at this body of texts from the wider time span of 1770 to 1830 allows for a clearer understanding of the shifting and ambiguous directions of opinion and debate than that afforded by a more narrow focus upon the 1790s.

Product Description: The material presented in this six-volume set moves away from courtly etiquette, adopting a more middle-class, domestic focus, and includes facsimile reproductions of sermons, poems, narratives and cookery books.

Product Description: The material presented in this six-volume set moves away from courtly etiquette, adopting a more middle-class, domestic focus, and includes facsimile reproductions of sermons, poems, narratives and cookery books.

Coming to prominence with the nineteenth-century novel, literary realism has most often been associated with the insistence that art cannot turn away from the more sordid and harsh aspects of human existence. However, because realism is unavoidably tied up with the gnarly concept of 'reality' and 'the real', it has been one of the most widely debated terms in the New Critical Idiom series.This volume offers a clear, reader-friendly guide to debates around realism, examining:*ideas of realism in nineteenth-century French and British fiction*the twentieth-century formalist reaction against literature's status as 'truth'*realism as a democratic tool, or utopian form.This volume is vital reading for any student of literature, in particular those working on the realist novel.

Product Description: Molly seems fated to suffer, firstly from her father's ill-conceived remarriage, and then from seeing her friend Roger Hamley infatuated with Molly's stepsister Cynthia. Everyone relies on Molly, but when will she have a fulfilling life of her own? This study edition contains commentary...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The English equity court of the nineteenth century is satirized in Dicken's tale about the suit of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce (view table of contents)