Superficially, Wives and Daughters seems a much quieter novel than its predecessors. Like the novel which Gaskell published immediately before it, Sylvia's Lovers, it is in some measure a historical novel: Gaskell returns to the 1820s and early 1830s, and to the same kind of provincial society that she depicted in Cranford. There is no hint of the growing industrial world; no juxtaposition of domestic drama with the emotions and actions of the Revolutionary Wars (apart from a lingering xenophobic feeling towards the French), nor any hints of the rick-burning and other agrarian outbursts of unrest at the time, which, in their turn, like the anti-press-gang riots, were to feed into the popular radicalism of the cities.

But Wives and Daughters is not a nostalgic novel. In it, Gaskell critically re-examines some of the themes which had been important to her throughout her writing career: the relationship between mother and child; questions of concealment and deception, and the socially revealing nature of closely observed detail. To this end, she builds on a new and forward-looking topic, hinted at in the underlying preoccupations of Sylvia's Lovers: the significance of Darwinian science, and its relationship to social change.

Social change forms the pivot of another work, which Gaskell wrote between the two longer novels: Cousin Phillis. In this, the young railway engineer Paul pays visits to some of his relatives, who live on a farm: a dissenting minister, and his wife and daughter. Phillis, the daughter, is kept in a state of protected childhood: a rehearsal, to some extent, of the theme of Mr Gibson's reluctance that his daughter Molly is growing up in Wives and Daughters. But in the shorter work, the sense of Phillis Holman's family being caught in a time-warp is made the stronger by the simplicity and piety of the rural life they lead. Paul soon comes to regard Phillis more as a sister than as a potential romantic attachment: not so his co-worker Holdsworth. Holdsworth observes her, admires her, casts her into passive roles, as a goddess of nature, Sleeping Beauty, the subject of his sketch. An unmissable career opportunity for Holdsworth suddenly comes up, and this male intruder into the quiet world of the Holman family leaves for Canada, telling Paul, ‘I shall come back like a prince from Canada, and waken her to my love’ (CP 315).