Sylvia's Lovers - Book 4

Sylvia's Lovers is by Elizabeth Gaskell, author of Wives and Daughters, Cranford and North and South among other novels.  This I think is the one novel I hadn't read yet.  I didn't have a clue what it was about.  It was good read but I don't think it is my favorite Gaskell.  It did not charm my heart like Cranford and Wives and Daughters and it didn't have the social analysis of North and South or Mary Barton, both of which were about the poor during the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in Manchester, England, the epicenter of it all.

Sylvia is a young beautiful girl who has recently moved with her parents to a small farm off the Yorkshire coast near the village of Monkshaven.  Her cousin is a shopkeeper in the village and has fallen in love with her.  She doesn't return the feeling though.  She meets a brave and handsome sailor and does fall for him, creating jealously on the part of Stephen, the reserved, intelligent, Quaker influenced shopkeeper cousin.  All the plot unrolls from this tension.

Gaskell set the novel during the Napoleonic Wars when government impressment gangs roamed seaside villages, kidnapping young men to fight against France.  While the village folk are patriotic they do not want their sons or husbands kidnapped.   They rely on their income from fishing and whaling and of course don't especially embrace the dangers of going off to war (though fishing and whaling were pretty dangerous too, they at least got to see their men for a number of months out of the year.)

While Gaskell is wonderful writer and draws characters with nuance and agility, I just didn't care for these characters as much as in her other books.  They aren't unlikable, but to me they just didn't seem as interesting as some other characters.  The novel is didactic in that Victorian way.  There is tension between one's faith and what one does, how to resolve the giving in to temptation and the injury that flows from that, how to forgive, and many other moral questions.  And the big question is, what is the difference between passionate love and making an idol out of one's lover?

I give Sylvia's Lovers two thumbs up just because is it better than most books, but it isn't my favorite Gaskell.

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