Review: Andrew Davies' adaptation of Gaskell's "Wives and Daughters"

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While not quite reaching the heights of Andrew Davies’ “Pride and Prejudice” adaptation, this well-paced, enjoyable rendition of a later Gaskell novel worked, showing Davies’ capacity to deliver sound work when he feels like doing so. It’s a woman-centred story, as the title might suggest, and the characters are generally distinct and well-drawn. Lady Harriet only swoops in for an occasional cameo, but when she does she’s amazing—except for her weird pixie cut in the final episode, too late to be part of that Terror-inspired wave of them. This is set in the 1830s, so what was going on there?

The protagonist’s stepmother Hyacinth and Hyacinth’s daughter Cynthia sucked a little as people in ways that felt fresh and realistic. Hyacinth attempts to make people happy by giving them what she herself would want. She’s consistently incapable of listening to others’ opinions, which is why the care-labour of being a companion to rich people must have been so constantly vexing to her, relying as it does on listening skills which she otherwise refuses either to learn or to employ. Self-obsessed Hyacinth doesn’t quite understand people around her as fully real, with emotional lives disconnected from her own. She earnestly believes her remarriage will be a boon to her stepdaughter: why wouldn’t it be, when she’s soaked up all these posh airs and is thus god’s gift? She’s not intentionally cruel except in that she never seeks to do anything about this persistent character flaw, however serious its consequences are for other people and her relationships with them. 

Cynthia is cleverer than her mother and significantly more self-aware, but she thinks about her rash flightiness like a congenital illness: she just can’t help being more fundamentally immature than her surface polish would suggest. It’s her nature! Cynthia is pleasant and funny, and infinitely more sinned against than sinning in the matter of her early engagement, but she’s prone to bad decisions that hurt even people she truly cares for like her long-suffering stepsister Molly, the heroine. Molly herself is under persistent narrative threat of retreating into the background on account of having fewer dramatic problems than those around her, but then that’s very true to life with Eldest Daughter Syndrome: the final scenes, as Katy reminded me, afford Molly no lines in her own happy ending.

I realise there’s a parallel structure with Molly briefly preferring the poetic Osborne to his steady brother Roger and Roger preferring Cynthia to Molly. Molly, however, was younger at the time, quickly amended her judgment based on learning more about the brothers and never embarrassed herself as Roger does with his engagement to Cynthia, who likes Roger about as much as she’d like a fairly comfortable chair, and for essentially the same reasons. (Osborne is another interesting, imperfect figure, though in another line, his flaws owing more to a failure to manage unfavourable circumstances outside of his control. His father, the Squire (aka Circumstances), lives long enough for a redemption arc, facilitated by Molly.) It’s hard to fully forgive Roger for sister-zoning the woman who learned botany for him, who follows his letters with compassion and avidity, who did all the familial heavy-lifting around his mother and brother’s deaths, and who is easily as hot as Cynthia. What is turning him off, here? Is it the fact that she’s hard-working rather than some ephemeral ideal of fuckable womanhood? At least he finally shapes up, but Jesus. 

As Katy put it, if you have an 'only real P&P adaptation'-shaped place in your heart, this will slot in in a way few other period dramas will.