Cranford (1851)

The country town of Cranford is home to a diverse range of characters, whose seemingly uneventful lives are full of conflicts, failures, and unexpected connections. Miss Matty Jenkyns, the novel’s main character, is a “spinster” in straitened financial circumstances after her bank fails, but who finds a way out of her troubles with her friends’ help and her own ingenuity. The novel’s representation of a world at once static and changing, isolated yet vulnerable to the conflicts in the outside world, makes it enduringly popular and relevant.