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    Cranford
    Cranford
    Cranford
    Audiobook6 hours

    Cranford

    Written by Elizabeth Gaskell

    Narrated by LibriVox Community

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    Cranford is the best-known novel of the 19th century English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. It was first published in 1851 as a serial in the magazine Household Words, which was edited by Charles Dickens.The fictional town of Cranford is closely modelled on Knutsford in Cheshire, which Mrs Gaskell knew well. The book has little in the way of plot and is more a series of episodes in the lives of Mary Smith and her friends, Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, two spinster sisters. The "major" event in the story is the return to Cranford of their long-lost brother, Peter, which in itself is only a minor portion of the work... (Summary by Wikipedia)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLibriVox
    Release dateAug 25, 2014
    Author

    Elizabeth Gaskell

    Mrs Gaskell was born Elizabeth Stevenson in London in 1810. Her mother Eliza, the niece of the potter Josiah Wedgwood, died when she was a child. Much of her childhood was spent in Cheshire, where she lived with an aunt at Knutsford, a town she would later immortalise as Cranford. In 1832, she married a Unitarian minister, William Gaskell (who had a literary career of his own), and they settled in Manchester. The industrial surroundings offered her inspiration for her novels. Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848. The best-known of her other novels are Cranford (1853) and North and South (1855). Elizabeth met Charlotte Brontë in 1850, and they struck up a great friendship. After Charlotte's death in 1855, her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, asked Gaskell to write her biography to counteract gossip and speculation. The Life of Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857. Gaskell was also a skilled proponent of the ghost story. Her last novel, Wives and Daughters, said by many to be her most mature work remained unfinished at the time of her death in 1865.

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