The lover (who is to a great extent a replica of the masterful mill-owner in _Shirley_) is uncertain and impersonal: and the minor characters are null.

One hopes, for a time, that Margaret herself will save the situation: but she goes off instead of coming on, and has rather less individuality and convincingness at the end of the story than at the beginning.

In short, Mrs.Gaskell seems to me one of the chief illustrations of the extreme difficulty of the domestic novel--of the necessity of exactly proportioning the means at command to the end to be achieved.

Her means were, perhaps, greater than those of most of her brother-and-sister-novelists, but she set them to loose ends, to ends too high for her, to ends not worth achieving: end thus produced (again as it seems to me) flawed and unsatisfactory work.

She "means" well in Herbert's sense of the word: but what is meant is not quite done.
To mention special books and special writers is not the first object of this survey, though it would be very easy to double and redouble its size by doing this, even within the time-limits of this, the last, and the next chapters.