The small town of Cranford is a distinct contrast to the more modernized, industrial city of Drumble, where the unnamed narrator, introduced later as Mary Smith, lives with her father, a businessman. This study guide references the 2009 e-book edition published by Floating Press.Ĭhapters 1-2 introduce Cranford, a fictional town populated mainly by unmarried and widowed women. Cranford became Gaskell’s most famous and most successful work following her death, and contemporary feminist scholars consider it a prominent work of proto-feminist literature from the Victorian era. Gaskell based the fictional town of Cranford on Knutsford in rural Cheshire, the town in which Gaskell grew up, raised by a community of widowed and single female relatives. The stories were published in one volume entitled Cranford in June 1853.

Gaskell didn’t intend to write more stories in the fictional world of Cranford, but with Dickens’s encouragement, an additional series of stories appeared irregularly in Household Words between December 1851 and May 1853. The first two chapters of Cranford appeared as short stories in Household Words, a weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens. Cranford, a comedic novel about the seemingly mundane lives of old spinsters in a small rural village, was a stark departure from Gaskell’s prior work.

Prior to publishing Cranford, Gaskell had published two novels that were highly controversial for their time: her first novel, Mary Barton, a groundbreaking portrayal of social class conflict, and Ruth, a tragic tale about the social stigma of illegitimacy in Victorian society. The episodic novel Cranford is perhaps Victorian author Elizabeth Gaskell’s best-known work.

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