Reading: Cranford
Jul. 5th, 2019 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI was looking for something fluffy and comforting to follow The Stone Sky (human kind cannot bear very much reality), and picked Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford largely as it was the oldest unread book on my kindle; in fact, it appears that I downloaded a free copy from Amazon in 2011, five months before I actually acquired my kindle, when I was still using the kindle app to read books on my iPad (possibly because I had knitted so many pairs of Cranford mitts that I thought I really should read the book).
It was certainly the perfect choice for fluffy and comforting. Cranford tells of the daily lives and small domestic dramas of the ladies who make up the society of the village of Cranford, modelled on Knutsford in Cheshire where Gaskell spent much of her childhood (probably only known to most people these days as the namesake of a service station on the M6). For various reasons, Cranford's society is almost exclusively female, consisting of a small group of spinsters and widows whose stories are recounted, with gentle irony, by the novel's first-person narrator, a younger woman who has moved away from the village but returns frequently to visit her friends, particularly Miss Matty Jenkyns, daughter of the late rector of the parish, a gentle, kind, mild-tempered woman who is the central figure in several of the series of vignettes that make up the novel.
I enjoyed this a great deal. The ladies of Cranford may be silly on occasion; they're certainly snobbish and greatly concerned with appearances and proprieties, but underneath all they are full of kindness and can't do enough to help a friend in need (and even former enemies become friends when in need). It's an utterly charming book, occasionally gently humorous, and absolutely the kind of read that restores your faith in human nature a bit.
It was certainly the perfect choice for fluffy and comforting. Cranford tells of the daily lives and small domestic dramas of the ladies who make up the society of the village of Cranford, modelled on Knutsford in Cheshire where Gaskell spent much of her childhood (probably only known to most people these days as the namesake of a service station on the M6). For various reasons, Cranford's society is almost exclusively female, consisting of a small group of spinsters and widows whose stories are recounted, with gentle irony, by the novel's first-person narrator, a younger woman who has moved away from the village but returns frequently to visit her friends, particularly Miss Matty Jenkyns, daughter of the late rector of the parish, a gentle, kind, mild-tempered woman who is the central figure in several of the series of vignettes that make up the novel.
I enjoyed this a great deal. The ladies of Cranford may be silly on occasion; they're certainly snobbish and greatly concerned with appearances and proprieties, but underneath all they are full of kindness and can't do enough to help a friend in need (and even former enemies become friends when in need). It's an utterly charming book, occasionally gently humorous, and absolutely the kind of read that restores your faith in human nature a bit.
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Date: 2019-07-06 07:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
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