- "Cranford" is the best known and most charming of Elizabeth Gaskell"s novels. It is a comic portrait of an early Victorian country village and its genteel inhabitants, mostly women, whose social attitudes remain firmly unchanging against the modernising world, and whose domestic details dominate conversation. Gaskell describes the uneventful lives of Cranford"s inhabitants in this witty and poignant classic which deserves to be read and re-read.