The End of the Novel: Gender and Temporality in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford

This article argues that Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853)—both the fictional place and the novel—cannibalizes the temporalities of other literary genres, such as the story and the newspaper, as a way of preserving a way of life under the double threat of patriarchy and modernization. I use the concatenation of temporalities in Cranford to bring into relief a hermeneutic between gender and time that is central to the culture of the nineteenth century: while the way one experiences and perceives time is already colored by gender expectations, these expectations are made legible insofar as they are practiced in time. This hermeneutic—where gender maps unevenly onto time and vice versa—contributes to the unique conflicts between Cranford and the masculine world that surrounds it