Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford in Suffrage Times

Abstract Elizabeth Gaskell’s best-known novel Cranford (1853), seemingly a cosy story of older women in a small provincial town, was repeatedly appropriated to vindicate female enfranchisement during the suffrage movement in Britain and North America. Suffrage variations tend to present Cranford as part of a continuum of women’s history. Frequently part of a trio of past, present, and future theatrical scenes, Cranford is made to stand for a past that, the plays intimate, has organically led to the suffrage present and will lead to the desired liberated futures. The suffrage adaptations gesture to these connections by underlining the novel’s rebellious humour and the assertive figure of Miss Pole (a potential suffragette foremother). After all, in Gaskell’s Amazonian town, women enjoy full citizenship and autonomy already, as homeowners and unofficial councillors.