SOURCE: “Affairs of the Alphabet: Reading, Writing, and Narrating in Cranford,” in Novel, Vol. 22, No. 3, Spring, 1989, pp. 288-304.

In the following essay, Schor analyzes Cranford as an experimental woman's narrative concerned with the cultural factors of women as writers and readers.

Elizabeth Gaskell's third novel, Cranford, which is most frequently discussed by critics and nostalgic readers as a potpourri, a bouquet of impressions, an elegiac tribute to passing ways in a dying English village,¹ is in fact better read as a woman writer's experiment with narrative, an extended commentary on the ways women are taught to read cultural signs, and a serious critique of the role of literature in shaping female readers. The novel moves through a variety of texts, commenting on such domestic forms as instruction books, fashion guides and letter-writing, and high literature in the form of poetry, epic and encyclopedias. It begins by presuming a...