CRANFORD is a novel in the form of 16 tales set in an English village inhabited mostly by single women and widows, whose remote, powerless lives are portrayed with a combination of satire, amusement, and sympathy. Elizabeth Gaskell's fourth novel reveals her to be a master storyteller with a lively eye for the eccentric, but it also has a decidedly feminist slant that was unusual in its time (1853) as well as an ironically distanced narrator who was perhaps even more unusual in Victorian fiction.