INSPIRED BY WIVES AND DAUGHTERS
Some stories are best told in installments, and
some were specifically intended to be told in this way Though
written for serial publication in the Cornhill Magazine,
Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters is not necessarily such a
tale. As Amy M. King describes in the Introduction, Gaskell often
defied the commercial demands of serial publication. For example,
at one point she rankled at the request of Charles Dickens, who
edited her work for one of his magazines, that she end her
installments with dramatic plot moments, and in the end she wrote
and paced her novels as she, and not her editors, wanted.
In the modern television miniseries, or even
serial television dramas, we might find serial publication’s
equivalent: the impetus to narrate beyond the confines of
individual installments, which results in a format uniquely suited
to stringing audiences along with a good yarn. The four-episode
Wives and Daughters (1999), produced by ExxonMobil
Masterpiece Theater and directed by Nicholas Renton, is an exemplar
of this updated form of serialization, dramatizing Gaskell’s story
of stepmothers, betrothals, and gossip with competence and grace.
That the format of choice for the adaptation was a television
mini-series, rather than film, is canny, for the effect replicates
in part the experience of serialization that the novel’s first
readers would have experienced.
While Renton’s film, full as it is with realistic
scenery and beautiful, ornate nineteenth-century dress, may not
feel to us like an “every-day story” (as Gaskell had originally
subtitled her novel), it nonetheless insists that the modern viewer
be reminded of an “everyday” that is now past. Moreover, it
impresses the modern viewer with its dramatic sweep, convincing
performances, and evocative sets, which are well employed in this
depiction of the lives of early-nineteenth-century “wives and
daughters.” Renton (Far from the Madding Crowd, 1998)
enlists a cast that comprises a stable of period-drama regulars,
among them Justine Waddell as an often silently expressive Molly
Gibson, Bill Paterson as Mr. Gibson, Francesca Annis as Mrs.
Gibson, Keeley Hawes as Cynthia Kirkpatrick, Anthony Howell as an
earnest Roger Hamley, and Michael Gambon as Squire Hamley
But the secret to this Wives’s success is
its screenwriter, Andrew Davies. Primarily known as the author of
the Bridget Jones screenplays, Davies has produced an
adaptation both faithful to Gaskell’s text (many of the film’s
scenes are peppered with lines taken directly from the book) and
refreshingly unadorned; the dialogue is crisp and naturalistic
rather than overly affected and distracting. Readers looking for
the satisfaction of a proper ending to Gaskell’s unfinished novel
will delight in the film’s dénouement. Rather than a mournful
good-bye at the windowsill reprising the famous engagement scene,
Davies has Molly promptly run after Roger; the end is a reunion
that gratifyingly relieves hours of carefully crafted tension,
which may satisfy readers denied the pleasure of a final
installment written by Gaskell.