Issicratea's Reviews > Sylvia's Lovers

This novel was such a find for me. I loved it from the outset, and it kept me with it almost all the way through. It seems extraordinary to me that this has generally been regarded as a minor work, and “one for the specialists.” For me, it was a potent and intelligent mid-Victorian novel, fully up to the level of the same author’s North and South.

A couple of things I love about Elizabeth Gaskell: her willingness to engage properly (and not in a patronizing way) with working-class characters, and the brilliant way in which she forges connections between personal histories and larger political themes. Among the great nineteenth-century English female novelists, George Eliot seems to me her only equal in those regards. I was interested to read in the—rather weak—introduction to the Penguin Classics edition that Gaskell was reading Adam Bede in 1859, during the time of her initial visit to Whitby, in Yorkshire, where Sylvia’s Lovers is set.

Gaskell exploits the tough, feisty, cliff-hung Whitby superbly in the novel, drawing particularly on two aspects of the town’s history: its involvement in the whaling trade in Greenland until the early nineteenth century, and the role that smuggling played in its economy. Gaskell sets the novel in the 1790s, at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, which allows her to play off the anti-state agency of the smugglers against the state-sponsored violence of the press gangs raising manpower for the wars. This is handled very well and weaves its way right into the weft of the novel, in terms of both theme and plot.

The characterisation in Sylvia’s Lovers I found quite magnificent. Gaskell makes a bold stake with Sylvia in getting us to sympathise with the figure who is generally the less sympathetic of female characters in nineteenth-century novels—beautiful, vain, volatile, impulsive—relegating the watchful, intelligent Hester, whom we would normally be called on to identify with, to a minor role. I liked both of them very much, as also the paired male characters, repressed Philip and strutting Kinraid; and the rich range of minor figures, such as Sylvia’s parents and their loyal farmhand Kester, all of whom are beautifully drawn. Philip, in particular—who is, in many ways, the key figure in the novel—seems to me quite a remarkable portrait, but there is no one, even down to quite minor characters, who does not get his or her due.

There are some aspects of this novel that are not so great. It’s true, as critics have said, that it descends into melodrama to some extent in its last third, and it never quite recaptures the wonderful pacing of the first third. I suspect there are mitigating circumstances for this; I gather from the introduction to my edition that Gaskell was under pressure to finish the novel, and the ending was very probably rushed.

Who cares, though? It would be great to find a novel that worked all the way through, but how rarely does that happen? What we have here is a sharply characterised, interestingly structured, intellectually engaged novel, written by a great writer at the top of her game. Perhaps that will do!