Sylvia’s Lovers – Elizabeth Gaskell

Sylvia lives in late eighteenth century Monkshaven (modelled on Whitby). The eponymous would-be lovers are her staid and respectable land-based cousin, Philip, and a heroic, if rakish, young man from a whaling ship, Charley.

As a historical novel, written mid-1800s, but set sixty years earlier, at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and legal impressment, Gaskell was keen to achieve realism both in terms of setting and history, and to this end heavily edited her first edition in the interests of verisimilitude.

With, at best, a weak grasp of history, and having visited Whitby only once, in extreme fog, the accuracy is wasted on me, but the rich attention to detail is not.