Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford

I finished listening to Cranford. It's short—sixteen inter-linked stories about a little village called 'Cranford,' composed mostly of spinsters and crazy widows. The narrator doesn't quite have a name, and not much of a backstory, but she watches everyone and describes everything they're up to with a lot of spirit and tenderness. This narrator is a brilliant way for Gaskell to tie all the observations together.

I'm not sure that it counts as a novel, but this might make it interesting to talk about with other not-quite-novels of earlier centuries. The nineteenth century feels like it has such a hegemony of REAL BIG, PROPER NOVELS, so it's interesting to see Cranford alongside those, and to wonder just how real that hegemony actually was.