Trin's review
Cranford (Penguin Classics)
by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Patricia Ingham
Trin's review
Cranford (Penguin Classics) by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Patricia Ingham
Trin's review
rating:
bookshelves:
classics
This is all Philip Glenister’s fault. I watched the miniseries because he was in it, and the miniseries reminded me that I’ve been meaning to read more Gaskell ever since I read North and South while at Trinity. Then it turned out that Glenister’s character isn’t even in this volume, the first in a loose series about the fictional town of Cranford. “Loose” is a good word to describe the book as a whole: it was written in installments (Gaskell was a friend of Charles Dickens and wrote for various publications he edited), and despite some narrative through-threads, it remains mostly a series of vignettes. It’s very funny, though, in that wry, satirical, Victorian way. At the same time, it’s quite sad: full of lost chances at love, which seem especially awful in an era when there were so few opportunities for women outside of marriage. Now, a large part of wha...more
