Cranford

The ladies of Cranford are full of human foibles that make them so dear. While they may not be how we picture the Amazon’s. They are survivors, preserving their town with the codes of their gentile society and trying to keep it from too much change. Rowena Fowler mentions how even the inheritor of the famous red silk umbrella, frail as she sounds has outlived her family: I can testify to a magnificent family red silk umbrella, under which a gentle little spinster, left alone of many brothers and sisters, used to patter to church on rainy days …the poor little lady—the survivor of all—could scarcely carry it. And their surviving spirit is also visible in Miss Betty Barker’s determination to save her Alderney cow, sewing flannel pajamas for it (at Captain Brown’s suggestion) when it lost all it’s hair after falling into a lime-pit. Miss Deborah Jenkyns is the pillar of their society, establishing the rules of behavior. With Captain Brown’s arrival they are innocently challenged, creating one of my favorite paragraphs in the first chapter.