I love Miss Matty and I loved spending time in Cranford.
The narrator is herself a lovely character, although the real star of the novel is the wonderful Miss Matty Jenkyns. Relatively little is revealed about the narrator, although more becomes known about her as the novel progresses. The novel is a first person narrative in the form of a memoir. The humour cuts through the sentiment, while making the sad moments even more poignant. Cranford is sentimental, but not cloyingly so. At least, the tears don't last quite till the end: it's a book which thankfully ends on a happy note. The pattern of alternating laughter and tears continued until the very end. Forty minutes later, I was crying about the death of one of the characters. Within five minutes of starting the novel I was laughing at the gentle satire on human foibles and life in a small town. They are united by being single - widows and spinsters - and by the fact that live in genteel poverty.Ĭranford is at times laugh-out-loud funny, at times deeply moving. It centres on the lives of a group of women who dominate society in the small town of Cranford.
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This is a short work: more a series of episodes than a linear narrative. After years of avoiding Victorian literature, in the past twelve months I've fallen in love with Gaskell's writing. Most importantly, though, the vignettes portray women adapting to circumstances and change beyond their control with strength and ingenuity. It is much more like catching up on news with an old friend. That tone, while often gossipy in nature, is without malice or meanness. It is a series of vignettes told by the narrator to the reader in an intimate tone.
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1)Cranford was originally published in a serial format in Charles Dickens' Household Words.
What could they do if they were there?" (pg. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford. If a married couple comes to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week. The narrator makes this clear at the very beginning:"In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women. They come in and out of Cranford and rarely stay for long. Hoggins) are, for the most part, transient characters. The narrator remains nameless through most of the book, but it is clear it is a younger female, one who lives in a nearby village and has close ties to the Cranford women. Forrester) - who try very hard to hold onto their sense of gentility and their way of life in a world that is rapidly changing before their eyes.
This story concerns some older spinsters and widows - a pair of sisters (Misses Deborah and Mattie Jenkyns) and some of their friends (Miss Pole, Mrs. It runs a gamut of emotions - funny, sad, exciting - without any sense of syrupy melodrama and was a joy to read from beginning to end.Cranford is a small English village comprised mostly of women. It has been awhile since I have read a book that has given me nothing but sheer delight. Praised by Charles Dickens as "delightful, and touched with the most tender and delicate manner," the novel remains a favorite with students and aficionados of nineteenth-century literature. Gaskell, the author preferred Cranford to all her other works, which include a popular biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë. Tales of the heroism and self-sacrifice of Captain Brown, the surprisingly betrothal of Lady Glenmire, and the future for pretty but poor Miss Jessie support a web of subtle but serious themes that include the movement from aristocratic to middle-class values, the separate spheres and diverse experiences of men and women, and the curious coexistence of customs old and new in a changing society.
Author Elizabeth Gaskell situated her stories in a hamlet very like the one in which she grew up, and her affectionate but unsentimental portraits of the residents of Cranford offer a realistic view of life and manners in an English country village during the 1830s.Ĭranford recounts the events and activities in the loves of a group of spinsters and widows who struggle in genteel poverty to maintain their standards of propriety, decency, and kindness. A sensitive and moving portrait of a Victorian town, captured at a transitional period in English society, Cranford first appeared serially in Charles Dickens's magazine Household Words from 1851 to 1853, and in book form in 1853.
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