![]() This “notoriously slippery form,” as Jenny Bourne Taylor notes (240), nevertheless became a vital crucible for the forging of narrative technique and experimentation. The length of these pieces also varied widely, leading Henry James to describe the Victorian short story disparagingly as a Gladstone bag into which anything could be crammed. Various terms were used in the nineteenth century to describe shorter fiction, such as “sketch,” “tale,” and “story.” The volatility of the genre is further complicated by the inclusion of semi-fictionalized travel accounts, reworkings of oral or folk tales, and translations and adaptations of French and German stories. 1 The nine instalments that make up Cranford appeared irregularly, yet the whole is a remarkably coherent narrative, although falling far short of the length of the three-volume novel. It began, as Elizabeth Gaskell notes, as “ one paper in Household Words” (Chapple and Pollard 535), and she had no intention of writing further pieces. ![]() C ranford (1853) is difficult to define in terms of genre. ![]()
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