Cranford

In the little country town of Cranford, the houses above a certain rent are held by women — widows and spinsters of small fixed incomes and exacting manners, who govern their genteel world by an unwritten code of calls, card parties, and frugality practised in private and never admitted in public. Gaskell calls them the “Amazons,” half in tribute and half in fond amusement, and Cranford is the chronicle of their days.

First written as a series of sketches for Charles Dickens's Household Words and gathered into a book in 1853, the novel has the loose, affectionate shape of memory rather than a driving plot. Its episodes are comic — a panic over a supposed robber, the sensation of a visiting conjuror, the gentle warfare of rank and precedence — but the comedy keeps opening onto something tenderer: the fragility of these lives, and the loyalty that binds the women to one another.

At its heart is gentle Miss Matty Jenkyns, long overshadowed by her formidable sister Deborah and increasingly alone. When a bank failure threatens to leave her with almost nothing, the comedy gives way to quiet heroism, and the ladies of Cranford close ranks around her in one of the most moving passages Gaskell ever wrote. Observed throughout by the affectionate younger narrator Mary Smith, the town is shown to us with a tone amused but never cruel, intimate but never sentimental.

Beneath the lightness runs a clear-eyed truth about genteel women with no fortune and no husband to fall back on, and a tender sense of a settled way of life being gently overtaken by the railway and the modern world. Warm, funny, and humane, Cranford remains Elizabeth Gaskell's most beloved book.