Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

English

First Advisor

Sarah Heidt

Abstract

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864-66) is (in)famously unfinished, with Gaskell’s death in November 1865 preventing her from writing her final novel’s final chapters. This non-ending allows for an interpretive window uncommon in Victorian literature; readers, critics, and adaptors have imagined and proposed their own endings since the novel’s final installment in the Cornhill. This honors thesis attempts to examine how these imagined endings reflect the way readings and cultural understandings of Wives and Daughters have changed over time. With a specific focus on the ending as a culmination of the heroine Molly Gibson’s emotional, romantic, and female socialization arcs, this thesis argues that each adaptation of Wives and Daughters creates a new Molly who uniquely reflects the place and period she was imagined in. The first chapter of this thesis close reads the novel to construct Molly’s initial character arc using only the primary text; the second reviews and interprets endings proposed by Gaskell’s editor Frederick Greenwood, literary contemporaries, and modern scholars; and the third explores the thematic messaging of the endings of the 1971 and 1999 television adaptations of the novel. With a mixture of close reading, literary review, academic criticism, and adaptation theory, this thesis takes a multi-modal and open-ended approach to the question: how does Wives and Daughters really end?

Rights Statement

All rights reserved. This copy is provided to the Kenyon Community solely for individual academic use. For any other use, please contact the copyright holder for permission.

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