Cranford and Other Stories

As diverse in setting as in subject matter, these tales move from the gentle comedy of life in a small English country town in "Dr Harrison's Confessions," to atmospheric horror in far north-west Wales with "The Doom of the Griffiths." "The story of Cousin Phillis," her masterly tale of love and loss, is a subtle, complex and perceptive analysis of changes in English national life during an industrial age, while the gripping Lois the Witch recreates the terrors of the Salem witchcraft trials in seventeenth-century New England, as Gaskell shrewdly shows the numerous roots of this furious outbreak of delusion. Whimsically modified fairy tales are set in a French chateau, while an engaging love story poetically evokes peasant life in wine-growing Germany.