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meganbmooreI actually read Cranford earlier this year, but got this off Amazon recently. A little under 2/5 of it is Cranford and the rest is six novelas and short stories. Namely Mr. Harrison’s Confessions, The Doom of the Griffiths, Lois the Witch, Curious, If True, Six Weeks at Heppenheim, and Cousin Phillis.
Mr. Harrison’s Confessions is about a young doctor who moves to a town populated mostly by women and finds himself engaged to several women without realizing it, and none are the woman he actually wants to be engaged to. It’s one of the stories that was folded into the Cranford miniseries and is pretty much a lesser Cranford. Not that a lesser Cranford is a bad thing by any means. Lois the Witch is a rather straightforward accounting of a young woman accused of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials, and does a concerningly good job of showing how jealousy and paranoia ruined lives. Cousin Phillis is about two cousins who, in any other story, would have fallen in love, but instead are platonic, and it’s surprisingly effective at examining a woman’s place in society through a man’s eyes. Curious, If True is rather fun as an earlier take on skewed fairy tales, but I confess to not remembering much about The Doom of the Griffiths and Six Weeks at Heppenheim, save that The Doom of the Griffiths was dark in a way that doesn’t appeal to me.
In complete honesty, I like Gaskell’s plots and themes, but find her actual writing to be somewhat on the dull side, and rather slow. That said, I seem to recall thinking that of most of the Victorian era writings that I read in high school and college, so that may be more a product of the style for when she was writing than Gaskell herself. I also find it to be consistently less of a problem the longer the work is, so format is probably also a factor.
Mr. Harrison’s Confessions is about a young doctor who moves to a town populated mostly by women and finds himself engaged to several women without realizing it, and none are the woman he actually wants to be engaged to. It’s one of the stories that was folded into the Cranford miniseries and is pretty much a lesser Cranford. Not that a lesser Cranford is a bad thing by any means. Lois the Witch is a rather straightforward accounting of a young woman accused of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials, and does a concerningly good job of showing how jealousy and paranoia ruined lives. Cousin Phillis is about two cousins who, in any other story, would have fallen in love, but instead are platonic, and it’s surprisingly effective at examining a woman’s place in society through a man’s eyes. Curious, If True is rather fun as an earlier take on skewed fairy tales, but I confess to not remembering much about The Doom of the Griffiths and Six Weeks at Heppenheim, save that The Doom of the Griffiths was dark in a way that doesn’t appeal to me.
In complete honesty, I like Gaskell’s plots and themes, but find her actual writing to be somewhat on the dull side, and rather slow. That said, I seem to recall thinking that of most of the Victorian era writings that I read in high school and college, so that may be more a product of the style for when she was writing than Gaskell herself. I also find it to be consistently less of a problem the longer the work is, so format is probably also a factor.