About Wives and Daughters By Elizabeth Gaskell Wives and Daughters is a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, first published in the Cornhill Magazine as a serial from August 1864 to January 1866. It was partly written whilst Gaskell was staying with the salon hostess Mary Elizabeth Mohl as her home on the Rue de Bac in Paris. When Mrs Gaskell died suddenly in 1865, it was not quite complete, and the last section was written by Frederick Greenwood. The story revolves around Molly Gibson, the only daughter of a widowed doctor living in a provincial English town in the 1830s.