I will certainly look for more of her work, and at 180 pages, you can’t go wrong keeping company with Cranford for an evening or two.Įnter your e-mail address to follow Shelf Love and receive notifications of new posts by e-mail. The book is acutely observed, full of the detail that brings characters to life, a joy to read. Elizabeth Gaskells episodic second novel, sometimes dismissed as nostalgically charming, is now considered by many critics to be her most sophisticated. But the book is not entirely comedy: I also found myself in tears several times, when an unexpected death occurred or a character who had seemed narrow turned out to be generous and kind. She shows the weaknesses and foibles of her subjects in a gentle social satire, and there are also scenes of farce that had me laughing out loud. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford is an ironic portrayal of. The return of a long-lost brother named Peter is the most dramatic event to occur over the course of the sixteen tales that comprise the novel. Gaskell’s voice is often witty, the way Jane Austen’s is. Mary Smith and her friends live in Cranford, a town predominantly inhabited by women. Each chapter, in its gentle way, tells of Cranford’s peculiarities: the way the women get along with each other, their quirks, their interests, the importance they place on “gentility,” their stubbornness and their good hearts, their history and the nostalgia of a place that has not changed with the changing times.

Thus opens Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Cranford, a wonderful, poignant comedy (or comic drama your choice.) I’ve never read anything by Gaskell before, and I was absolutely delighted with her story of a small town inhabited almost entirely by widows and spinsters. It first appeared in instalments in the magazine Household Words, then was published with minor revisions as a book with the title Cranford in 1853. “In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women.” Cranford is an episodic novel by the English writer Elizabeth Gaskell.

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