SOURCE: "'Filled in with Pretty Writing': Desire, History, and Literacy in Sylvia's Lovers" in Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel, Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 153-81.

In the following essay, Schor contends that Sylvia's Lovers is a plotting of desire—especially female desire, which "works its own narrative transformations " and gestures towards a history, writing, and identity particular to women.

"Desire is always there at the start of a narrative," Peter Brooks has suggested: the desire of the reader for movement, of the text for its own end, of the characters for whatever the desideratum of the plot is to be.¹ In both Sylvia's Lovers and Wives and Daughters, Gaskell's attention moves from the focusing of desire into the marriage plot to the way desire itself is plotted. Where the earlier novels offered fairly conventional progresses of both characters' and readers' desires, here, there is...