Sylvia's Lovers is set during the French Revolutionary Wars in the remote whaling-port of Monkshaven in Yorkshire where the sea dominates the lives of the inhabitants. The people of Monkshaven hate the French, but they live in greater and more immediate fear of the callous press-gang, who snatch sailors returning from a whaling trip before they have even spoken to their friends or families.
In Elizabeth Gaskell's provincial England war mirrors a private violence which has already disrupted the lives of her fictional characters. Sylvia is a heroine loved by two very different men - the bold sailor Charley Kinraid and the cautious and conventional Philip Hepburn, who idolizes her. The novel follows her development from a wilful, imaginative, but not especially clever girl, to an alert woman whose suffering changes her.
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