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Loading... Sylvia's Lovers (1863)by Elizabeth Gaskell
None. Country beauty settles for dull shopkeeper when her jolly sailor is hustled into the Royal Navy by a press gang during the Napoleonic wars. Read my reviews about this and other books at http://thegrimreader.blogspot.com/2011/09/sylvias-lovers-12-by-elizabeth-gaskell... A good novel with solid northern characters. I have to admit that Sylvia's Lovers left me strangely unmoved. There was a point about two-thirds of the way through the book that it became a page turner but it was rather short lived. The most interesting parts reflect the anger and agonies caused by the press gangs at the end of the eighteenth century. The worst parts have to do with the silly melodramatic plot and tiresome use of dialect (as if Ms. Gaskell didn't want us to forget for a second that the characters are hopelessly uneducated). In the end, it's a rather mediocre example of her work. An interesting novel--not as good as Gaskell's North and South or Wives and Daughters, but still an interesting historical novel...i.e., written about press gangs and the whaling industry during the Napoleonic Wars sixty years later. no reviews | add a review
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Hope to have a review of this in the ezine 'the F word' out soon, going into it's 'anti romantic' tendencies as I see them.
I think readers often find Gaskell's intention unclear because she finished the third volume in a rush, so Sylvia's bitter disillusionment with her one-time-Idol Kinraid receives less stress than her growing obession with him in the first volume. (