Mrs Gaskell’s heroines all want, however vaguely, something more than convention allows them. Mary Ann Evans – who, interestingly, wrote as George Eliot – explores the often difficult relations between brother and sister in The Mill on the Floss (1860). In Middlemarch (1871–2), the intelligent, idealistic Dorothea, seeking to devote her life to something – or someone – worthy, is soon trapped in a miserable marriage. Though she finally achieves happiness of a kind with another man, she feels that there was something better that she might have done. George Meredith’s The Egoist (1871) is a
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