Craford by Elizabeth Gaskell

If I had to pick one word to describe this book, it would 'watery'. It's stuffed with aging female characters who are crying all the time. It's a collection of loosely connected sketches, lovingly satirizing life in a tiny Victorian town and not-so-lovingly satirizing the world beyond it. I don't like Elizabeth Gaskell much, I find her nauseatingly moralistic and her writing heavy and unwieldy. This was published in installments in one of Dickens's journals, and Gaskell slavishly (in my opinion) pays explicit homage to Dickens's greatness, rating him, in the very first chapter, as great than that great eighteenth-century man of letter, Samuel Johnson. I couldn't figure out much about the narrator, it seems like she was younger than the other women described, and definitely unmarried, but her oversentimentality and lack of anything like an interesting personality make her seem like she's sixty. The character around which most of the stories revolve is a Miss Matty (properly Matilda) whose greatest tragedy is (predictably) that she was forced by family circumstances to reject a man whom she was desperately in love with, but completely secretly, of course. I was incredibly irritated by Gaskell's very Dickensian (I'm sure she thinks that a compliment) combination of the ironic and sentimental, and the ridiculous characters, who are constantly aflutter and crying and feinting over something. Really didn't endear me to Gaskell, though this had less of her usual appalling moralizing than something like Mary Barton.