During 1851-53, Gaskell wrote two novels in tandem: Cranford, a collection of affectionate and comic stories of elderly widows and spinsters living peacefully in the eponymous village, and Ruth, a sensational stor y of a beautiful young seamstress who raises her illegitimate son pretending to be a widow, becomes a sick-nurse, and dies a dramatic death at the outbreak of an epidemic. The two pparently radically different novels actually share a central preoccupation with illness. In Cranford, however, the elderly characters are viewed primarily in relation to the aging body. This seemingly pacific novel, whose sphere is limited to a quiet village, is throughout overshadowed by mortality as a threatening undercurrent; this paper will contend that what illness ultimately indicates is thepassage of time and the inevitable movement of the heroine Matty towards death.It also investigates the distinctive of its narrative style, an issue inseparable from the narrated matter: the layer of first-person narratives and the dramatization of the act of telling and listening to stories. These complex formal mechanisms allow the narrator-character Mary Smith, a young woman from a big city, to observe, record, and even indirectly experience the daily lives and old customs of the elderly female community
