A rich, comic and illuminating portrait of life in a small town, Cranford has moved and entertained readers for generations.
The rural town of Cranford is a community that runs on co-operation and gossip, at the heart of which are the daughters of the former Rector: Miss Deborah Jenkyns and her sister Miss Matty. But domestic peace is continually threatened in the form of financial disaster, imagined burglaries, tragic accidents and the reappearance of long-lost relatives. In their simple, well-ordered lives they face emotional dilemmas and upheavals, small in the scale of the ever-shifting world, but affectionately portrayed by Elizabeth Gaskell with all the weight and consequence of a grand drama.
‘String is my foible’
A tarnished silver teapot. A tin of buttons, their parent garments long decayed. A bundle of yellowing letters, in my mother’s hand. Look: here she is, smiling in her nurse’s uniform in the...
Read moreHaving a Good Cry
‘The saddest story I ever wrote,’ Mrs Gaskell said of Sylvia’s Lovers, published in 1863. The book had been languishing in my daughter’s bookcase for years, bought (but not read) to encourage...
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