She was awarded the CBE for her services to drama in 1992 and the Patricia Rothermere Award for her contributions to British Theatre in 2001. Her film appearances have included Stiff Upper Lips (1997), Howards End (1992) and Wolf (1994). Prunella Scales is a classically trained stage actress but is best known for her role as Sybil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers (1975-1979) and for her role as Queen Elizabeth II in A Question of Attribution (1991), for which she was nominated for a BAFTA. She was also friends with Charlotte Brontë and after her death, her father, Patrick Brontë, chose Gaskell to write The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Gaskell was an accomplished writer who had many of her stories published in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words. Her wry account of rural life is undercut, however, by tragedy: with such troubling events as Matty's bankruptcy, the death of Captain Brown and the unwitting cruelty of Peter Jenkyns. Through a series of satirical vignettes, Gaskell sympathetically portrays changing small town customs and values in mid-Victorian England, in a community governed by old-fashioned habits and dominated by friendships between women. These and many more all make up the fantastic melting pot that is Cranford.A vivid and affectionate portrait of the residents of an English country town in the mid-19th century, Cranford describes a community dominated by its independent and refined women, relating the adventures of Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, two middle-aged spinster sisters striving to live with dignity in reduced circumstances. Apart from Mary, there are characters both fabulous and ridiculous: The Misses Jenkyns, daughters of the former rector their brother Peter, who ran away to India and who had the good sense to stay there Miss Pole, the town gossip the Honourable Mrs Jamieson, daughter of a governor and the widowed daughter-in-law of a baron – Cranford’s social arbiter Dr Hoggins, a local surgeon of uncertain social status as he has a ‘vulgar’ surname and his sister, a wealthy widow yet regarded by Mrs Jamieson as her social inferior Betty Barker, retired milliner to the gentry and former maid to Mrs Jamieson Captain Brown, a half-pay army captain, who comes to live at Cranford with his two daughters.
As the daughter of a businessman living in Drumble (Manchester) she only visits Cranford occasionally, a device which is made to account for the novel’s episodic presentation. It is an affectionate portrayal of people, customs and old-fashioned snobbery that were already becoming anachronisms the narrator is ‘Mary Smith’, whose point of view is that of a younger woman from a very different background simply reporting her experiences. First published as Our Society In Cranford in 1851 in Dickens’ Household Words, this is an episodic and satirical novel of daily life in a small English country town (based on Mrs Gaskell’s own home town of Knutsford).
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