Molly feels very keenly, and longs for things with all the strength of an ardent nature, but she always subordinates herself and her wishes to others. In the character of Cynthia, Mrs. Gaskell makes a plea for the heartless coquette. Cynthia is beautiful, she likes to please those in whose company she finds herself, but quickly forgets the absent. It is not her fault that young men's hearts are brittle, for it is as natural for her to smile, and be gay and forget, as it is for Molly to love, be silent, and remember. So it is Cynthia who has the lovers, while Molly is neglected. Clare, Cynthia's mother, is more selfish than her daughter, but she has learned the art of seeming to please others while thinking only of pleasing herself. She is as crafty as Becky Sharp, but softer, more feline, and more subtle; a much commoner type in real life than Thackeray's diplomatic heroine. Mr. A. W. Ward, in the biographical introduction to the Knutsford Edition of her novels, says of her later work: "When Mrs. Gaskell had become conscious that if true to herself, to her own ways of looking at men and things, to the sympathies and hopes with which life inspired her, she had but to put pen to paper, she found what it has been usual to call her later manner--the manner of which _Cranford_ offered the first adequate illustration, and of which _Cousin Phillis_ and _Wives and Daughters_ represent the consummation." The same critic compares the later work of Mrs. Gaskell with the later work of George Sand and finds that "in their large-heartedness" they are similar. He also gives George Sand's tribute to her English contemporary. "Mrs. Gaskell," she said, "has done what neither I nor other female writers in France can accomplish: she has written novels which excite the deepest interest in men of the world, and yet which every girl will be the better for reading." It is not often that a novelist finds another writer to take up and enlarge her work as did Mrs. Gaskell. Her novels contain the germ of much of George Eliot's earlier writings. _The Moorland Cottage_ suggested many parts of _The Mill on the Floss_. Edward and Maggie Brown--the former important, consequential and dictatorial, the latter self-forgetful, eager to help others, and by her very eagerness prone to blunders--were developed by George Eliot into the characters of Tom and Maggie Tulliver. The weak and fretful mothers in the two books are much alike, while the love story and the catastrophe have the same general outline. They both drew largely from the working people of the North or of the Midlands, and both constantly introduced Dissenters. Silas Marner belongs to the manufacturing North, and the people of Lantern Yard are of the same class as those of Manchester and Milton. Felix Holt and Adam Bede belong to the same type as Jem Wilson and Mr. Thornton, while Esther Lyon is not unlike Margaret Hale. Both often presented life from the point of view of the poor.