Cranford

A small Cheshire town run almost entirely by women of small means and large dignity, where the arrival of a bank failure or a conjuror counts as an era. Gaskell wrote it in sketches for Dickens''s magazine, with no plan for a novel, and the shape it took is the shape of gossip. The town is Knutsford, where she grew up. Fifty-eight plates of painting, from Tissot to Marianne North, gather the parlours, tea tables and far-off landscapes that give Gaskell''s small-town comedy its wider weather.