Cranford

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mrs Gaskell is making a comeback. And not just with my online Trollope group, which has been reading Cranford recently and comparing – or rather, contrasting – it with Trollope’s novels. Libraries are acquiring her novels, many are on the shelves of bookstores, and all are easily available through amazon.com. The BBC has produced excellent, and very popular, made-for-TV series of Cranford, North and South, and Wives and Daughters. My alerts with Google and the NY Times pop up with Gaskell as often as with Trollope. Two hundred years after her birth she is more popular than she has ever been.

She made her name with Cranford, published in Dickens’ Household Words from 1851 to 1853 and the book remains her most beloved. Based on the town of Knutsford where Gaskell lived with an aunt when she was a child, Cranford is near a big city, Drumble, a stand-in for Manchester, where Gaskell lived for most of her adult life with her husband, a Unitarian minister.

The latest BBC series – there are actually two series – are a combination of Cranford, My Lady Ludlow, and Mr Harrison’s Confessions. The TV version of the story very different from that in the book, which is a cozy episodic collection of stories with a thin plot and much humor. For lovers of Victorian fiction Elizabeth Gaskell is a must-read author. And if you fall for her as I have done, Jenny Uglow has written a fine biography.

The house in which she lived with her husband still stands. Unfortunately, after years of fund-raising and restoration thieves recently stole the roof for the lead and costs for a new roof and repair of water damage are significant.

2011 No 86  Coming soon: Economic Facts and Fallacies, 2nd ed, by Thomas Sowell

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