Gaskell's affectionate portrait of a small English town run almost entirely by its genteel, quietly resourceful women. Its linked episodes of everyday kindness and comic propriety made it one of the most beloved studies of female community in Victorian fiction.
Sources for Elizabeth Gaskell — Cranford
Elizabeth Gaskell — Cranford in Women's Literature
Held in the Women's Literature chamber of the Babel Nexus Index.
- Christine de Pizan — The Book of the City of Ladies (1405)
- Anne Bradstreet — The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650)
- Aphra Behn — Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave (1688)
- Mary Scott — The Female Advocate; a Poem (1774)
- Mary Wollstonecraft — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
- Mary Hays — Female Biography, Vol. I (1803)
- Mary Hays — Female Biography, Vol. II (1803)
- Mary Hays — Female Biography, Vol. III (1803)
- Mary Hays — Female Biography, Vol. IV (1803)
- Mary Hays — Female Biography, Vol. V (1803)
- Mary Hays — Female Biography, Vol. VI (1803)
- Jane Austen — Pride and Prejudice (1813)
- Mary Shelley — Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
- Charlotte Brontë — Jane Eyre (1847)
- Emily Brontë — Wuthering Heights (1847)
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning — Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
- Sarah Josepha Hale — Woman's Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women (1853)
- Elizabeth Gaskell — North and South (1854)
- Harriet Jacobs — Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
- Christina Rossetti — Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)
- Louisa May Alcott — Little Women (1868)
- George Eliot — Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871)
- Olive Schreiner — The Story of an African Farm (1883)
- Emily Dickinson — Poems (1890)
- Ida B. Wells — Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892)
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton — The Woman's Bible (Part II) (1898)
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman — The Yellow Wallpaper (1899)
- Kate Chopin — The Awakening (1899)
- Edith Wharton — The House of Mirth (1905)
- Edith Wharton — The Custom of the Country (1913)
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman — Herland (1915)
- Lucy Maud Montgomery — The Blue Castle (1926)
- Nella Larsen — Passing (1928)
- Virginia Woolf — A Room of One's Own (1929)
- Elizabeth von Arnim — The Enchanted April (1922)