Elizabeth Gaskell 
Cranford (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) 

Cranford is a humorous account of a nineteenth-century English village dominated by a group of genteel but modestly circumstanced women. By eschewing the conventional marriage plot with its nubile heroines and focusing instead on a group of middle-aged and elderly spinsters, Elizabeth Gaskell did something highly unusual within the novel genre. Through her masterful management of the novels tone, she underscores the value and dignity of single womens lives even as she causes us to laugh at her characters foibles. Charles Dickens was the first of many readers to extol its wit and charm, and it has consistently been Gaskells most popular work.

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Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born in London in 1810 to William and Elizabeth (Holland) Stevenson. She said she began writing her first novel,
Mary Barton, in an attempt to recover from her grief over the loss of an infant son. It is a measure of her stature within the Victorian literary world that Charlottes Brontës family chose Gaskell to be Brontës first biographer.