Cranford

xxx, 297 pp. Hugh Thomson binding with elaborate gilt decorations. Gilt page ridges. Preface by Anne Thackeray Ritchie. "The women of the small country town of Cranford live in genteel poverty, resolutely refusing to embrace change, while the dark clouds of urbanization and the advance of the railway hover threateningly on the horizon. In their simple, well-ordered lives they face emotional dilemmas and upheavals, small in the scale of the ever-shifting world, but affectionately portrayed by Gaskell with all the weight and consequence of a grand drama."