She is intimately familiar with the ways and means of Cranford, but nonetheless she is an outsider or, at best, a partial participant. The first-person narrator, Mary Smith, is a much younger woman than the majority of Cranford ladies and is a visitor. The narrative situation is significant for the story’s many paradoxes. As Nina Auerbach pointedly puts it, at first sight “the appellation ‘Amazons’ seems simply to chuck these sweet ladies under the chin but the Amazons bob up repeatedly in Victorian writing, usually to be banished as soon as evoked.” More recently, Eileen Gillooly has likewise endeavoured to account for the aggressive humour of this charming tale by showing how “in possession of the Amazons” can be read differently: While Cranford seems to be a town that belongs almost exclusively to women, Cranford also possesses the Amazons by locking them away from the world.

The opening sentence propels the reader into the center of this ambiguity: “In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women.” In Ancient Greek mythology, the Amazons are warrior women who live without men, and while the genteel ladies of Cranford form a community of women in which men of their class are practically nonexistent and not necessarily welcome unless they are first successfully domesticated, or feminized, the comparison of these women to a race of warrior women is replete with fond ridicule. In its exploration of sexual politics, it has been alternately interpreted as a satire on embittered spinsters and as a fond detailing of middle-class feminine gentility. This new interest in the story’s socioeconomic background, however, has also accentuated the intriguing ambiguity of its representation of gender relations. Recent interest in the material conditions of domestic life in Victorian Britain has revealed that industrialization, imperialism, and the new consumer society are central to the story’s treatment of class and gender issues.Ĭranford has thus been read as an insightful point of entry into discussions of the 19th-century transport system and commercialism and of developments in the patterns of production, distribution, and consumption (Hall). As a fond record of an old-fashioned backwater, the story has primarily been praised for its charm, domestic detail, and vivid creation of a rural society dominated by a close-knit group of impoverished gentlewomen.

An additional episode, “The Cage at Cranford,” was published in Dickens’s All the Year Round in November 1863.Ĭranford is based on Elizabeth Gaskell’s childhood memories of the small town of Knutsford, Cheshire. First serialized in Household Words, a weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens, between December 1851 and May 1853, Cranford appeared in volume form in June 1853. An episodic novel of linked stories set in Cranford, a fictitious country town in northern England.

Cranford mrs gaskell