SOURCE: “Women Without Men at Cranford,” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 13, 1963, pp. 132-45.

Most readers seem to feel that the spirit of Cranford is most aptly expressed in the delicate—not to say charming—illustrations of Hugh Thomson. The world of Cranford is faded, full of small snobbery and great kindness; it is a feminine novel, not only as all the important characters are women, but as pre-eminently the work of a woman, ever held by the details of a room's arrangement or a bonnet's trimming. This familiar view is usually accompanied by a subsidiary judgement: that the book has no structure. The short story that now forms the two opening chapters was originally all that there was to be of Cranford; the rest is a happy accident. The fiction is tender and reminiscential, and depends not on plot but on character. Its want of structure is no fault, since only the vestige of plot is required to present the characters, whose descent from the eighteenth-century sentimental comic novel is obvious. Miss Matty is, like the rest of her friends, as Lord David Cecil has observed, ‘the childlike, saintly innocent, full of harmless foibles,’ easily found in Sterne or Goldsmith. For readers who take this view of the book, the summit of Mrs. Gaskell's literary achievement will probably be the chapter entitled ‘Visiting’, the simple description of a Cranford tea-party at which nothing occurs that is not to be expected. They would attribute the success of this scene, in Lord David's words, to the ‘play of Mrs. Gaskell's microscopic, incessant, ironical observation’—in other words, to her sympathetic record of a life of innocent triviality.

This is the sort of delightful insipidity to which the novels of Jane Austen have often been reduced (she too has suffered the fate of Thomson illustrations), and it is this fact that may put us on our guard. For many people the reading of Jane Austen has become so conventionalised that they are incapable of tasting the acid in her lemon-drops; the same could be true of Mrs. Gaskell. Charlotte Brontë wrote to the author of Cranford that her book was ‘graphic, pithy, penetrating, shrewd’, besides being ‘kind and indulgent’; it is time that the penetration of her art was given fuller attention. If Cranford is a novel of escape—Mrs. Gaskell's escape from the confining world of Manchester to pastoral Knutsford, the reader's escape from a depressing reality—then its psychological accuracy is strangely out of place in a genre noted for evasion and lack of observation in this direction (compare, for example, the work of a contemporary novelist like Monica Dickens). There is more to be said about Mrs. Gaskell; the fundamentally serious concerns of her book have been neglected for a belle-lettriste study of incidental detail. The force of the novel lies in plot, however, not in character.

Cranford is divided into two unequal halves; the original first episode forms one half, and all the rest is complementary to it. This first episode is the story of the invasion of Cranford (which is ‘in possession of the Amazons’—that is to say, which boasts a society exclusively feminine) by one man. Blunt, impoverished Captain Brown offends the women of Cranford by his very ‘masculine gender’, ‘his connection with the obnoxious railroad’ (on which he is employed), and by the fact that he makes no attempt to conceal his poverty with talk of ‘elegant economy’. Despite a cool welcome, the Captain overcomes the women's initial hostility, for they soon discover the usefulness of having a man about the place. The underlying strain in relations between the women and the man is revealed, however, in an absurd quarrel that arises between the Captain and the women's leader, Miss Jenkyns. She will have it that no one can compare as a writer with Dr. Johnson; he must obstinately prefer the author of Pickwick. Abruptly relations are brought altogether to an end by Brown's death on the railway-line. Miss Jenkyns immediately takes over the responsibility of providing for his two daughters, the elder of whom, a permanent invalid, dies soon after. Miss Jenkyns lives to marry off the younger, Miss Jessie, to the lover whose hand she had previously refused so that she might attend her sick sister.

It is not difficult to outline the psychological implications of this story. Cranford's women, either widows or spinsters, are obliged to do without men, and therefore pretend to be as good as, or even better than, men. Their gentility, which is a claim to have more money and more class than is the case, is a social pretension parallel to the sexual. Mrs. Gaskell both sympathises with their assertions of independence and deplores its anti-social nature. She permits Brown to be killed, as it were, but guilt (and common sense) forbid her to triumph at it.

Captain Brown's death is a terrible thing just because he is a representation of the Victorian male as a benign deity. Nevertheless his underlying distaste for the Cranford way of life is shown clearly, both in his contempt for feminine opinion and in the bizarre and popular anecdote of Miss Barker's cow, which lost all its hair in a lime-pit. He advises ironically that she be given a ‘flannel waistcoat and flannel drawers’. This mocking image of the unprotected female clad in masculine attire has an almost surrealist impact, like the ‘stick in petticoats’, the name given by the boys of the village to an ancient red silk umbrella now the property of a puny spinster.

The death of Captain Brown, who is a genuinely attractive character, though hardly drawn in depth, was evidently a great shock to the first readers of the novel. (I think that it still is.) Ruskin ‘flew into a passion at Captain Brown's being killed and wouldn't go any further’, and Mrs. Gaskell herself says that he was put to death ‘very much against my will’. John Forster could only forgive his killing by reflecting that only so was the touching scene of Miss Brown's death made possible. Forster's reaction is susceptible of two interpretations. He may mean that Miss Brown's death would not be so pathetic if it weren't that her father's death is being kept a secret from her; but this does not exclude the possibility of his intending his remark to be taken as an extension of the principle of an eye for an eye. At any rate, the strong feelings which people admit to having been roused by Cranford's opening chapters seem to add likelihood to the theory that deep unconscious motives are here at work.

This theory is well borne out by the text. If Mrs. Gaskell was writing from a feeling of unconscious envy at the male, it can hardly be by chance that Brown's death enables Miss Jenkyns to replace him as paterfamilias to the two girls. This change in her role is reflected in her change of headgear; at the funeral she wears a bonnet ‘half helmet, half jockey-cap’, that is, distinctly masculine. However, even the author must have felt that the spinster's assumption of authority was bought at too high a price, and the episode concludes with concessions to a world in which two sexes exist—Miss Jessie and her lover with his arm round her waist are left alone in the drawing-room, whilst Miss Jenkyns, ‘who had hitherto been a model of feminine decorum’, tells her sister to mind her own business.

There is a final rambling monologue by Miss Jenkyns in her old age, made shortly before she is to die, in which the themes of the episode are drawn together clearly. She talks of her reading and, as ever, recommends Dr. Johnson; but now she mentions, not his novel Rasselas, but the Rambler, which, as the Captain pointed out at the beginning of their great quarrel, first appeared in parts, like Pickwick. Dr. Johnson leads her to talk of ‘that strange old book, with the queer name, poor Captain Brown was killed for reading—that book by Mr. Boz, you know—.’ She still sees Brown's death as the consequence of his failure to give way to her will. Lastly, her hidden desire to equal the male appears in a significant form, that of a childhood memory. ‘Boz’ reminds her that ‘when I was a girl—but that's a long time ago—I acted Lucy in “Old Poz”.’ Old Poz is a short play for children by Maria Edgeworth, in which the heroine, Lucy, saves an old man from committal as a vagrant by her father, who is the local Justice. There is no hero. And so the episode ends on the note sounded by Miss Jenkyns's inadequacy and pathos, symbolized by an appeal to the time of pre-adolescence, when the child-girl, engaged in no real battle of sex, rules her father by her guile. Pathetic as it is, Mrs. Gaskell's conclusion underlines the essential unrealism of an attempt to protract this kind of existence into adult life.

It is well known, and may be easily deduced in the reading, that its author never intended that there should be more of Cranford than this story, which was first published as ‘Our Society at Cranford’ in Household Words for December 13, 1851. The story was so successful that Dickens persuaded Mrs. Gaskell to write more, and a further seven episodes of Cranford life appeared at irregular intervals in his magazine between 1851 and May 1853. In June of that year the stories were reprinted in a barely altered text under the title of Cranford.

How far do the stories form an artistic whole? Most readers seem to think of Cranford as a series of disconnected lavender-and-lace sketches, and yet there are signs that Mrs. Gaskell consciously set out to make her book a formal unity as soon as she had begun its second instalment, ‘A Love Affair at Cranford’, which comprises Chapters 3 and 4 of the finished work, and which first appeared on January 3, 1852. This episode contains the first references to what we may term the sub-plot of the novel.

Miss Matty's maid, Martha, is engaged as a replacement for the unsatisfactory Fanny in Chapter 3; her story features as a kind of counterpoint to that of her mistress. Miss Matty remains confirmed in her spinsterhood, whilst by the end of the novel Martha has both a husband and a child. This contrast between the two is made clear in the first chapter in which they figure together. Miss Matty solemnly instructs the maid to have no ‘followers’, whilst she unthinkingly declares to her mistress: ‘I like lads best.’ By the end of Chapter 4 she has introduced her young man, Jem Hearn, to the house, with Miss Matty's approval—a change of heart occasioned by reflection upon the unhappiness of her own lonely state. In Chapter 6 the young couple are heard kissing in the street at night; in Chapter 8 it is plain that Martha is already thinking of marriage, since she finds the presence of the butcher's new bride in church far more interesting than that of the little widow, Lady Glenmire. Chapters 14, 15 and 16 are marked by engagement, marriage and birth of the first child respectively. The story of Martha and Jem provides a standard of sexual behaviour by which we may measure the adequacy of their betters' response to love and affection.

Though the sub-plot plays an important part in creating an appearance of unity in the novel, this is very much dependent upon our acknowledging the central sexual concern of the main plot. It is this which I hope here to establish. Until this has been done, the sub-plot can evidently not be used as evidence of the book's unity.

There are further reasons why the sub-plot is inadmissible as evidence. Firstly, the sub-plot disappears in the middle of the novel. I think that this can be explained by the fact that the Cranford panic is too absorbing to require the presence of Martha's love-affair. Since every one is supposed to be obsessed with the idea that he is about to suffer a violent robbery, the triviality of a servant's affairs would be out of place. Similarly, Miss Matty's loss of fortune is meant to shock us, so that we can only see her, see her and admire. Secondly, the sub-plot obviously functions most powerfully within the episode, as in the case of ‘A Love Affair at Cranford’, where Miss Matty's decision to allow Martha a follower results from what she herself has undergone in the course of the episode. However, it would be difficult to justify the scene at the end of Chapter 6, in which Miss Matty hears the two lovers kissing in the street, and which bears no relation to the subject of the episode (Peter Jenkyns's flight from Cranford), except in terms of the novel seen as a whole. This scene is not a later addition to the story, but was to be found already in the Household Words version.

It must be admitted, though, that it has never been suggested that Mrs. Gaskell did not try to make a unity of her several episodes, only that she did not suceed in this. This is certainly true of the way in which, as the book progresses, she incorporates allusions to what has gone before. Miss Matty refers constantly to her dead sister; Miss Betsy Barker, who is mentioned in passing in Chapter 1, is at the heart of Chapter 7; there are references to Mr. Holbrook, Miss Matty's former suitor, who features in Chapters 3 and 4, in at least three further places through the book; Captain Brown's name reappears several times; Peter Jenkyns, introduced in Chapters 5 and 6, is never far from our minds after Chapter 11. The last chapter brings back as many people to Cranford for a final reunion as the author can find—Brunoni the conjurer, from Chapters 9 to 12, and even Jessie Gordon, the Captain's daughter, from Chapter 2. None of this represents a successful realisation of the unity at which Mrs. Gaskell aimed, for the simple reason that there seems to be no necessity in the reintroduction of many of these characters and their names. Peter Jenkyns's return is a particularly glaring example of a forced happy ending, and no reader can ignore this fact. Yet the book is successful as a whole, though perhaps not as a flawless whole.

The difficulty by which the critic is here faced, that is, of discovering the book's effective principle of unity, can surely be solved by a simple change of approach. Instead of treating Cranford as the literal representation of a series of actions that might really have taken place, he must rid his mind altogether of the knowledge that some of them did in fact take place, and treat the novel as symbolic of a conflict within the mind of the author. Cranford is a kind of trimmed and tidied dream, in which Mrs. Gaskell's unconscious hostility to the male struggles with her awareness of the pointlessness of such hostility in the predominantly masculine society of her day. We have already seen how deeply the death of Captain Brown engaged her emotions; it remains to apply our reading of that episode to the rest of the book.

From this point of view, the most striking feature of Chapters 3 to 16 is their total reliance on the material of the Captain Brown story, which is split up into its constituent parts and then rehandled, this time with a pro-male bias. Thus, the stroke of melodrama at the heart of the book—the arrival of Brunoni, the conjurer, which Lord David Cecil deplores—is a revised version of Captain Brown's invasion of the village of Cranford, as the identity of names (Brunoni's real name is Samuel Brown) should tell us. Instead of being killed, Brunoni falls ill and almost dies, but is saved in time by the good ladies of the village—a clear expiatory action. The story of Miss Jessie Brown, who renounces marriage in order to nurse her sick sister is paralleled in the development section of the book by the story of Miss Matty, who has also given up a lover, Mr. Holbrook, for the sake of her sister. (Holbrook was not socially acceptable to Miss Jenkyns; again the themes of gentility and frustrated sexuality come together.) Whereas Miss Jessie was given a second chance to take the man she had refused, for Miss Matty there is none—Holbrook dies shortly after renewing acquaintance with her, leaving the spinster the prey of futile regret. Miss Matty is made a scapegoat for the sins of her sister. The bizarre transvestist episode in which Peter Jenkyns dresses up as his sister Deborah, and pretends to be nursing a baby (a taunt at her unmarried state) is a mirror-image of Deborah in her helmet-like bonnet, and also of the cow in the flannel waistcoat.

These themes, however, demand a more extended treatment; it will soon become apparant, I hope, that the later chapters of Cranford are an attempt to expiate the guilt of the Captain's death and at the same time an elegy on the insufficiency of the female in a world of two sexes.

The first attempt at expiation is made in Chapters 3 to 6; these form a group of their own in the book since they are all retrospective in aspect. The story of Miss Matty's former suitor, Holbrook, suggests the desolation of Cranford's life without men, and would dissociate the author from any thought of feminine self-sufficiency; she does not believe that women are better than men. As further proof, she describes the misery that befalls Cranford subsequent to the departure of Peter Jenkyns, who is represented as a fugitive from female tyranny.

We begin by a glimpse of Miss Matty's spinsterly life; there is a particular emphasis on her repression of sexuality—the slavish imitation of her dead sister, the fanatical fear that the maid may have ‘followers’, the neurotic manner of eating oranges, which may be sucked in private, but not in public—‘there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies’—, the panic ensuing on the visit of a male cousin from India, whose Hindu servant reminds Miss Matty of Bluebeard. The narrative now dives deep into Miss Matty's past to provide the explanation for her sterile isolation in the thwarting of her love for Holbrook. When she meets with him again after so many years there is an immediate slackening of anti-masculine pressure: ‘It is very pleasant dining with a bachelor,’ said Miss Matty … ‘I only hope it is not improper; so many pleasant things are!’ But within a little while Holbrook has died; Miss Matty tempers her private sorrow by a generous concession to her maid. She smiles upon the visits of Martha's young man.

Mrs. Gaskell has still not shown the full horror of the Cranford situation, nor has she really made up for the violence of Brown's death. Her first attempt to deal with this is made in terms of sexual perversion, disguised in the familiar form of the practical joke. Peter Jenkyns dresses up in woman's clothes not once, but twice, particularly addressing his affront to Deborah Jenkyns, who believes women are superior to men. His appearance in her clothes nursing the likeness of a baby is a blow at both Cranford's sexual repression and its gentility (since the baby would be illegitimate). This gentility is the veneer on the estrangement of Peter's father and mother, which has already been revealed in the total divergence of interest in their letters. The consequence of Peter's escapade is another burst of the same violence that killed the Captain, only this time the male is allowed to survive:

‘Old Clare said, Peter looked as white as my father; and stood as still as a statue to be flogged; and my father struck hard! When my father stopped to take breath, Peter said, ‘Have you done enough, sir?’ quite hoarsely, and still standing quite quiet … Peter turned to where the people outside the railing were, and made them a low bow … and then walked slowly into the house.’

His departure from home breaks his father and eventually kills his mother. Ironically, a shawl sent from India arrives the day after she has died; Peter's gift is his mother's shroud. He returns only once to Cranford, displaying the mastery he has fought so hard to win; his father ‘never walked out without Peter's arm to lean upon’. He goes back to India and nothing more is heard of him. This preliminary reworking of the Brown episode is both savage and pessimistic.

Peter's withdrawal to India is part of a pattern of images linking the male with the mysteries of the East. Miss Matty's cousin returns from India with a ‘Hindoo body-servant’; Signor Brunoni is dressed in ‘the Turkish costume’, and is in fact an English soldier who served in India; Jessie Brown's suitor went travelling ‘in the East’ after she had refused him.

His withdrawal is also specifically linked with his sister's spinsterhood. Miss Matty says: ‘Deborah said to me, the day of my mother's funeral, that if she had a hundred offers she would never marry and leave my father. It was not very likely she would have so many—I don't know that she had one. …’ This vow of chastity is both voluntary, and so analogous to penance, and involuntary, that is, like a punishment.

The lack of true vitality in Cranford consequent upon the absence of the male is evidenced in the next two chapters, which describe the emptiness of village society—its greed (Mrs. Jamieson), its snobbery (the attempt to cut Mrs. FitzAdam), the triviality of it (the anecdote of Mrs. Forrester's lace collar). The sterility of this life is reflected in terms of gentility, when Mrs. FitzAdam is admitted to Cranford's inner circle:

‘As most of the ladies of good family in Cranford were elderly spinsters, or widows without children, if we did not relax a little, and become less exclusive, by-and-by we should have no society at all.’

This is the introduction to the novel's second movement, as it were, in which the principle of male vitality returns to Cranford, bringing with it promise of new life. Signor Brunoni is certainly God-like, though seen to ‘frown and look enraged’; he is described as ‘a magnificent gentleman’, ‘like a being of another sphere’. Despite Miss Pole's attempts to explain away his tricks, the women are genuinely frightened of his mysterious powers, as they are impressed by his appearance. They betray a mingled fear and delight characteristic of their dealings with the other sex. Miss Matty's question whether it was proper to visit Mr. Holbrook is repeated; she asks Mrs. Forrester ‘if she thought it was quite right to have come to see such things.’

Following this memorable evening, fear gains the upper hand, and the Cranford women are seized by a hysterical sense of panic. Wild stories of theft and violent robbery are circulated. There is no truth in them; they are merely a reflection of the unconscious fear aroused by Brunoni's demonstration of masculine power. Significantly it is Miss Pole (who takes a keen interest in all bachelors, and is quite eager to show up Brunoni's tricks) who spends most of her time in circulating these stories, especially one of her own, about ‘an Irish beggar-woman’, which eventually turns into one about an ‘Irishman dressed up in woman's clothes’. When Mr. Hoggins, the surgeon, denies her story to the effect that he has been robbed, she won't believe him, thinking that he is ashamed to admit to the fact: ‘Men will be men … My father was a man, and I know the sex pretty well.’ This, one of the best jokes in the book, is one of the deepest as well.

The sexual aspect of this hysteria is made quite clear in the description of the women's feeling of helplessness. Miss Pole goes so far as to hang a man's hat in her hall, to deceive any potential robbers who might otherwise think her unprotected. She tells a gruesome story about a girl who baffled some robbers with ‘Italian irons, heated red-hot, and then restored to blackness by being dipped in grease’; she particularly enjoys part of the story describing blood oozing from the robber's hiding place, ‘dwelling on each word as if she loved it’.

The hysteria reaches its height one evening when the women recount in confidence their inmost fears. The narrator, Mary Smith, is afraid of eyes looking at her—we remember her description of Brunoni's eyes staring through the curtain before his performance began. Miss Matty's fear is one that is often considered characteristic of old maids, and is here given a strangely concrete quality—the fear that there will be a man under her bed who might catch hold of her leg, ‘just as she was getting into bed’. Mrs. Forrester's fear of ghosts caps the rest and sends the ladies off home in a state of terror. It is difficult for the commentator to resist the suggestion that the ghost most likely to appear is that of the Captain.

The next morning, the discovery of Brunoni, alias Samuel Brown, sick and out of funds, with a wife and child to keep, allays the panic strangely; the women are able to ‘make up’ to Brown by nursing him back to health. Mrs. Brown's courage and devotion stand in startling contrast to the nervous behaviour of the Cranford ladies; in particular, the story of her journey on foot through the Indian jungle is a parable on the courage that a marriage requires, and which is so signally lacking in the ladies who were frightened even to walk together down one dark lane.

It is no surprise that under the benign influence of Brunoni Lady Glenmire and Mr. Hoggins should become engaged, for it is part of Mrs. Gaskell's expiatory art to depict the male as a marriage-god. However, she has not yet brought the story to a conclusion; Cranford may have propitiated the male, it has not been reconciled to the rule of the male. Lady Glenmire's impending marriage is resented—by Miss Pole, who would like to know why the surgeon couldn't have married a single woman instead of a widow, and by Miss Matty:

Miss Matty was really upset by the intelligence she had heard. She reckoned it up, and it was more than fifteen years since she had heard of any of her acquaintances going to be married, with the one exception of Miss Jessie Brown; and, as she said, it gave her quite a shock, and made her feel as if she could not think what would happen next.

The book moves without a break into the last movement, in which the community of Cranford is restored to a fuller life by its acknowledgement of the Hogginses’ marriage, and by the return of Peter Jenkyns. This is only possible, however, after the women have been shown their own inadequacy.

Miss Matty's loss of fortune is the blow which is to purge the book finally of the dangerous elements of its feminism. Miss Jenkyns's domination of her sister, even after death, culminates in financial ruin; her attempt to rival the male in his own world, that of banking and investment, has brought this upon her sister. Miss Matty, of course, is equally responsible for ignoring the advice of the narrator's father. As a consequence, the moment of truth arrives; Cranford is faced with a reality against which its gentility is helpless. Miss Matty is now dependent upon those who have paid no regard for Cranford spinsterhood—Martha and Jem—and on the male, Mary Smith's father, who is called upon to sort out Miss Matty's affairs. The effort of her friends is not sufficient to save her gentility from taking a severe knock. Only her patience and her acceptance of straitened circumstances are what have always been required. Cranford has been humanized; it is now a fit place to welcome back Peter Jenkyns, and it is now so changed that it can take even the return of Signor Brunoni in its stride.

We should not, however, take this as a happy ending (pace Lord David). Miss Matty may be left playing with a baby, but it is not her own; her house may now have a master, but it is her brother, not her husband. Cranford ends on an admonitory note for the reader, with a reminder that coming to terms with reality cannot always bring back lost chances. It makes the important point that dear old lovable Miss Matty is dear old pitiable Miss Matty too.

It is, of course, possible to interpret most novels in terms of sexual symbolism; but the aim of this essay has been to demonstrate the consistency of Mrs. Gaskell's concern, down to the boa-constrictor associated by Miss Matty with Peter's Indian home, or the Cranford ladies' favourite sweetmeats, which are called ‘little Cupids’. It is not possible, within this short space, to follow all the ramifications of the theme as they demand. There is, however, one large question towards which some sort of answer must be provided. How far have we examined the sources of Cranford in this essay, and how far have we been considering the work itself? This in its turn will lead us back to our original enquiry whether the book forms an artistic whole.

On the whole, it seems likely that Mrs. Gaskell was aware of much of what has been outlined above. She could hardly not have intended us to see the panic caused by Brunoni as the result of the women's lack of sexual balance; she must have seen that Peter's practical jokes were also protests against a feminine society. In the very first sentence we are told that Cranford is ‘in the possession of the Amazons’; she could not have had the sexual issue far from her mind at any time.

On the other hand, it would be surprising to find her aware of any connection between the women's panic and the invasion of the male, Brunoni; she would say that it was his tricks that were frightening. Personally, I doubt whether the identity of name between Captain and Samuel Brown was at all conscious, though it certainly might have been. But these things are none the less effective, since Mrs. Gaskell has adapted her narrative method to the deeper psychological pattern of guilt and expiation with great skill.

Her style, for example, is one that is extremely lucid and direct; there is no fumbling. We believe in the action in very much the way in which we believe in a dream when we dream it; we don't stop, for example, to consider whether Peter Jenkyns's dressing-up is possible, because we don't get the chance. The unambiguous prose insists that we should believe, just as in scenes which might very well be sentimental—for example, that in which Miss Pole and Miss Matty visit Mr. Holbrook—the direct appeal to emotion is all the more effective for Mrs. Gaskell's not ‘writing it up’.

The form of the novel is carefully chosen too. The fact that it is a pastoral, in which Cranford gains emotional significance by contrast with the industrial town of Drumble, is admirably in harmony with its being a verbalized equivalent of dream. The master-stroke is putting the story into a first-person narrative. Mary Smith, of whose speaking voice we are made constantly aware, casts a totally subjective aura over the action. By identification with the narrator, we identify with the author of the story, and are so led to feel, at an unconscious level, the unity of her book.

There are faults; to be completely satisfied, one would prefer, I think, an action that was also adequately motivated at a conscious level. Peter's return is certainly not managed with the greatest dexterity, but this cannot damage the book's central theme of adjustment to the reality-principle. It may be said that, in acquiescing to the masculine predominance of her day, Mrs. Gaskell is a quietist; but this is to misunderstand the novel, which has to do, not with the wrongs of the female at the hands of the male, but with the consequences of attempting to repress sexual needs under the cover of feminism. This may seem a very cumbersome exegesis of a simple fiction. While we acknowledge Cranford's wit and good humour, however, it it not out of place to consider that these are the fruits of its author's own sanity and adjustment to the masculine world about her.