Sylvia’s Lovers is one of the later novels of Elizabeth
Gaskell.
It was published 2 years before
her death, after which she started to write her masterpiece,
Wives
and Daughters. It is a
historical novel, set in the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
Wars.
Mrs Gaskell visited Yorkshire and
researched the area of Whitby, where the novel is set, and studied the history
of the time.
The plot involves the work
of the Press Gangs which took men to serve in the Navy, during the Wars…
Gaskell described it as the “saddest story” she ever wrote. It is perhaps the most Bronte- like and
tragically emotional of all her novels. Some
literary critics have felt that it is melodramatic and that this weakens it as
a novel.
It is also set among simpler working people, rather than
either the upper classes or the Mancunian working class. Sylvia’s father is a farmer, a man of little education...
and she herself is not very clever. Like
her father, she is barely literate and her passionate emotions rule her, more
than her brains.
She is 17, when the novel starts, and her cousin, Philip
Hepburn, a Quaker who works in a shop, is in love with her and wants to marry
her. Sylvia finds him dull and prosy… something
of an Edgar Linton. She herself enjoys
her work as a farmer’s daughter, of spinning, housework, and helping to tend
the animals. She rarely dresses up or
even wears shoes.
She is irritated when Philip who is better educated and eager
to set up his own business, persuades her mother that he should teach Sylvia a
bit more about books. She falls in love with Charlie Kinraid, who works on a
whaling ship. He is adventurous,
passionate, wild and fond of women, and Philip is furiously jealous of his new
rival.
