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  • Published: 3 September 2009
  • ISBN: 9780141442549
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

Cranford




Beautifully designed, clothbound edition

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.

Gaskell's best known work is set in a small rural town, inhabited largely by women. This is a community that runs on cooperation and gossip, at the very heart of which are the daughters of the former rector: Miss Deborah Jenkyns and her sister Miss Matty. But domestic peace is constantly threatened in the form of financial disaster, imagined burglaries, tragic accidents, and the reapparance of long-lost relatives.

  • Published: 3 September 2009
  • ISBN: 9780141442549
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

Other books in the series

Russian Thinkers
The New Penguin Book Of American Short Stories, From Washington Irving To Lydia Davis
When You Are Old
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
The Good Soldier
Selected Poetry
Venus in Furs
Man and Superman
Military Dispatches
The Prelude

About the author

Elizabeth Gaskell

ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810–1865) was born Elizabeth Stevenson in London, the daughter of a Unitarian minister who resigned his position on conscientious grounds. Her mother died a year after her birth, and Gaskell spent her formative years in the care of relatives in northern England. In 1832, she married William Gaskell, a well-known Unitarian minister, and joined him to work among the poor for social reform. They had four daughters, as well as a son who died in infancy. His death left Gaskell so distraught that she began writing for distraction. Her first major success was the novel Mary Barton (1848)—published, as were her first several works of short fiction, under the pseudonym Cotton Mather Mills. For many years, she also wrote regularly for Charles Dickens’s magazine, Household Words, contributing stories and a serialized novel, Cranford. Meanwhile, the Gaskells’ home in Manchester became a popular stop for writers and reformers, including Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Ruskin, and Charlotte Brontë, who became a close friend. After Brontë’s death, her father, Patrick Brontë, asked Gaskell to write her biography. The Life of Charlotte Brontë proved a pioneering and controversial psychological study of Brontë’s family life, and remains perhaps the most important book on the writer. Gaskell died of a heart attack in 1865. A memorial to her lies at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

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