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. A hundred plates, from Gainsborough to van de Velde, follow the small dramas of the town through portraits and storm-tossed ships.