Mrs Gaskell’s bicentenary: Knutsford’s Amazons

On the southern edge of Manchester, a few miles from the airport, there is a commuter town where the Victorian novel remains very much alive. This year Knutsford celebrates the bicentenary of its most famous daughter, who immortalised this ‘dear little town’ in several of her finest stories. More than 150 years after it first appeared, in weekly instalments in Dickens’s Household Words, Cranford remains Mrs Gaskell’s most enduring creation. And in these streets you can still trace the outline of the world that she created.

Elizabeth Gaskell was born in 1810, in Chelsea, the daughter of a Unitarian minister. Her mother died when she was a few months old, and Elizabeth was packed off to an aunt in Knutsford. She grew up in a house where men were conspicuous by their absence, and this genteel matriarchy found a lasting voice in Cranford, the novel that she based on the prim spinsters who shaped her character.