‘So runs the round of life from day to day’: Wives and Daughters and Comic Realism

Abstract

Wives and Daughters is a tour de force of comic realism. Its unmistakably comic quality is easily detected in the frequently ironic narrative mode, the focus of interest on romantic love, culminating in the heroine’s (imminent) marriage to the man she has long admired in secret, in the breadth of social perspective and the emphasis on manners as the principal formal medium of the book.