![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Each time I reread it, I come away feeling the same: after hundreds of pages, with the happy conclusion in sight, the abrupt end is always a shock and there is always disappointment that, even though you know how Gaskell intended to end the story, you’ll never have the pleasure of seeing how she would have executed it, what artistry and skill she would have employed in giving our heroine her much-deserved happiness. Gaskell penned before her death to the satisfactory outline of an ending contributed in her absence by her editor. It was a summer while I was still in high school, I know, and I remember finishing it as I rode the bus home from work, missing my stop as I read those last pages, reeling with both delight and a sense of immense loss as the story transitioned from the last rather anti-climactic sentence Mrs. I can’t remember exactly when I first read Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, what urged me to select it in the first place. ![]()
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