Eppie and Cosette are both abandoned by their father, and the wives of their fathers soon pay the price. Eppie, Silas’ daughter, was abandoned by Godfrey, which he later regretted when his second wife Nancy could not bear a child. This caused Godfrey to then decided to come clean and try to win back the daughter that he abandoned sixteen years ago. This baffles Silas, which is shown when Eliot writes “then, sir, why didn't you say so sixteen year ago, and claim her before I'd come to love her, i'stead o' coming to take her from me now, when you might as well take the heart out o' my body?” (Eliot 162). The emotion that Silas is feeling when Godfrey threatens to take back Eppie those many years later is shown best in this scene. After Eppie refuses to leave Silas to go with Nancy and Godfrey, Nancy feels the pain the most because there is nothing she can do, and it is not …show more content…
The pain that she feels is shown by “The tears [in her] eyes, but her sympathy with Eppie was, naturally, divided with distress on her husband's account. She dared not speak, wondering what was going on in her husband's mind,” (Eliot 161). In Les Miserables, Cosette, the daughter of Fantine and her unknown lover, was abandoned when she was still in the womb by the lover, which caused emotional and eventually the death of Fantine. When Fantine left the child with the Thenardiers to look for work elsewhere, the Thenardiers abused the child as well as Fantine. They asked for more and more money from Fantine and “when this sum was spent, the Thenardiers began to look upon the little girl as a child which they sheltered for charity, and treated her as such...Cosette ate with [the dog and cat] under the table in a wooden dish,” (Hugo 46). Fantine lost her job later on in the story, and could not keep up with the rising amount of money that she owed the