highly recommended

ld came through for my birthday and gave me the 3 movies I asked for. I watched Cranford in one sitting last night. Loved, loved it. If you have not seen it yet, get a copy now. As always you will love and embrace Gaskell's richly drawn characters. Cranford society is filled with independent, hysterically funny, proto-feminist Amazonian women.

The movie is really, as I understand it, a compilation of 3 of her works and it delights with such quotable wit and dialogue as this:

[Mary has brought oranges as a present for Matty and Deborah]
Miss Deborah Jenkyns: I would prefer it if I did not enjoy oranges. Consuming them is a most incommodious business.
Miss Matty Jenkyns: There is not such a lot of juice, Deborah dear - only when they are sliced with a knife.
Mary Smith: At home we make a little hole in our oranges and we suck them.
[Deborah looks horrified]
Miss Matty Jenkyns: That is the way I like to take them best, but Deborah says it is vulgar and altogether too redolent of a ritual undertaken by little babies. My sister does not care for the expression [whispers] "suck".
Miss Deborah Jenkyns: [primly] We will repair to our rooms... and consume our fruit in solitude.
[embarrassed, Deborah gets up and leaves the table]


Is that not delightful? And now if you will excuse me, I will repair to my room to consume Gaskell's book in solitude:)