Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell 
Wives and Daughters 

‘Wives and Daughters’ is a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, written whilst Gaskell was staying with the salon hostess Mary Elizabeth Mohl at her home on the Rue de Bac in Paris. It tells the story of an orphaned girl whose father decides to marry again. The novel is a complicated and absorbing story about Molly’s life with a stepmother and her daughter, her love and hopes, and a fight to find her personal place in this world.