Sylvia's Lovers (1863) is the gloomiest of all Gaskell's longer fictions: she herself called it ‘the saddest story I ever wrote’. It is set at the time of the French Revolutionary Wars, in Monkshaven (Whitby) on the Yorkshire coast, and Gaskell worked hard to establish a sense of very precise locality, from delineating the exact topography of the expanding fishing-port, to rigorously recording all dialogue in the local dialect, something which many reviewers found wearisome. Had she not done this, however, one would have missed the juxtaposition of localized, domestic drama, with its suspicions, apprehensions, and tensions, with a period of national anxiety displaying identical characteristics. The forces of passion, violence, and revenge dissolve the boundaries between the two worlds.

The plot involves few major characters, but is convoluted. Each of the protagonists is caught in an emotionally charged set of relations. Sylvia is a farmer's daughter, courted by two men: her respectable, somewhat self-righteous cousin Philip, a draper's assistant, and the far more dashing Charley Kinraid, a ‘specksioneer’ – the chief harpooner on a whaling ship. Sylvia's preference for Kinraid is obvious, particularly to Philip, who is not just straightforwardly jealous, but worried that the specksioneer will treat Sylvia in as cavalier a fashion as he has been rumoured to behave towards other girls. On his way back to join his whaling ship, Kinraid is seized by the press-gang who roam the Yorkshire coast looking for promising sailors to carry off to fight against the French. Philip witnesses this abduction: Kinraid begs him to tell Sylvia what has happened and swears that he will be faithful to her, a message which Philip fails to deliver, letting Sylvia believe that her betrothed must have been drowned. This lie is not told for altruistic reasons, like those in Ruth and North and South: it is fundamentally a means of exercising power over Sylvia. Events initially seem to play into Philip's hands. Charley's sodden hat is found, and since no one else witnessed this particular press-gang raid, drowning would seem to be the only fate which could possibly have befallen him. Sylvia's own father is found guilty of inciting a riot against the press-gang tactics, and is executed; her mother falls ill, and, despondently, Sylvia marries Philip, partly to give her mother a home, partly out of a feeling of obligation for all he has done for her family.