Not a lot happens in the village of Cranford. Or, at least, that's the way it seems. life In fact it is stuffed full with the details of Victorian. Interestingly for the period # in which it was written (1851-1853), Gaskell depicts this world entirely through the eyes of the women who inhabit it. Again, given its era, Cranford as such devotes considerable space to the machinations involved in selecting the right bonnet, societal slights and quandaries and the general minutiae of domestic life. But again this is Cranford’s success—in these seemingly superfluous details, Gaskell in fact explores the complexity of being female in Victorian Britain, a role wrought by the profound restrictions imposed through a myriad of established patterns of codeified behaviour. Elizabeth Gaskell’s circle of women, led by the youthful Mary and the ageing Miss Matty—women at two distinct phases of their female life cycle as so precisely viewed by the Victorians—give much food for thought.
*****
(Five stars out of five)
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