Elizabeth Gaskell’s enchanting tale of romance, scandal, and intrigue in a gossipy English town comes to Masterpiece Theatre in a lavish four-part production of Wives and Daughters, adapted by celebrated screenwriter Andrew Davies.
Davies, who wrote the scripts for such Masterpiece Theatre classics as A Rather English Marriage, Moll Flanders, the House of Cards trilogy, and Middlemarch, found Wives and Daughters to be perfect costume-drama material. It posed a rather interesting problem: Gaskell died just before completing the book. She was obviously aiming at a happy ending, and Davies has supplied the lost denouement with surprise and style.
“Wives and Daughters is about the ordinary mysteries of life,” says producer Sue Birtwistle, previously responsible for the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice and Masterpiece Theatre’s King Lear. “[It’s about] where love comes from, how it grows, how it can break our hearts, how it can bring happiness and fulfillment. It’s about the mistakes we make and the secrets we have to keep.”
Wives and Daughters is a BBC America/WGBH Boston co-production.
Shown on PBS Masterpiece Theatre.
Starring Francesca Annis, Justine Waddell, Bill Paterson, Keeley Hawes, Michael Gambon.
Note: Many people place Wives and daughters in the [Victorian era](http://www.willowandthatch.com/period-films-to-watch/period-dramas-victorian-and-edwardian-eras/), but, it seems the story begins about five years earlier. Writing in the 1860s, Gaskell chose to set the story in the 1830s, the time of her girlhood, making Molly her own contemporary: “Set in English society before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters centres on the story of youthful Molly Gibson, brought up from childhood by her father. When he remarries, a new step-sister enters Molly’s quiet life – loveable, but worldly and troubling, Cynthia. The narrative traces the development of the two girls into womanhood within the gossiping and watchful society of Hollingford.”
May be suitable for older children.