up for sale, and later of selling tea to supplement her vastly reduced income. The community also comes to her aid as a secret meeting is called to discuss ways of helping the old woman. Towards the end of the novel, Matty's brother Peter, who had disappeared years ago, returns from India to live with her. Soon Brunoni performs again to the delight of his audience, and things seem to have returned to normal in Cranford. The novel's narrator closes the story by paying homage to its heroine, observing, “We all love Miss Matty, and I somehow think we are all of us better when she is near us.”

Major Themes

Solidly based in the tradition of realist fiction, Cranford is thought to represent Gaskell's fictionalization of the small Cheshire village of Knutsford, where she was raised by her maternal aunt following her mother's death. The author describes Cranford as being in the possession of women, and the town itself displays the ideals of a feminine community run according to the principles of custom, gentility, and propriety. In sharp contrast to Cranford, Gaskell gives her readers the nearby commercial world of Drumble (Manchester), where hectic materialism threatens to erode the tranquil stability and traditional moral order of the outlying provincial town. Cranford's virtues are said to be personified in the figure of Miss Matty, who in cultivating a powerful sense of community is central to the novel's themes of fulfillment through generosity, love, and acceptance of change. Sex and gender themes also permeate in the work, with the story frequently interpreted as a series of symbolic male invasions into the otherwise serene, feminine village. Likewise, notions of lingering guilt, repressed female sexuality, and love thwarted by class figure prominently in the novel, particularly in regard to Matty, whose failure to declare her feelings for Mr. Holbrook invokes all of these themes. Additionally, while Miss Matty is generally viewed as the central, heroic character of the work, Cranford is occasionally read as a satire of habitual middle-class behavior and thoughtless conformity to custom, a minority opinion that frequently corresponds with an interpretation of Miss Matty as a figure evocative of pathos rather than admiration.

Critical Reception

Often dismissed by early critics, many of whom saw it as merely a collection of charming, nostalgic vignettes from provincial life, Cranford has since come to be regarded as Gaskell's most significant and representative novel. The work was extremely popular with readers upon its publication, and some of Gaskell's contemporaries among the literati did appreciate its considerable merits, among them Charlotte Brontë who described it as “graphic, pithy, penetrating, shrewd.” Indeed, most modern critics have insisted that the realistic novel additionally contains an ironic, almost subversive element, and that Gaskell does not simply idealize life in a simpler, quieter time and place. Some commentators have also appreciated Gaskell's skillful unification of the plot, even though the novel was originally intended only as a short story. Critics have also praised Gaskell's characterization of Miss Matty, said to be one of her outstanding literary creations. Others have faulted the work for its ostensible lack of structure, a flaw dismissed by many who have seen the story as thematically unified and essentially character-driven. A good deal of contemporary critical attention has also been focused on the narrative technique of Cranford, and particularly on its narrator, Mary Smith, who develops from a rather unobtrusive presence into an important interpretive figure in the novel. In more recent years, feminist critics of Cranford have endeavored to rectify Gaskell's earlier reputation as a minor novelist, and have recognized in the work themes associated with feminine desire and repression in a male-dominated culture.