A life 'so very different to what I expected': Miss Matty's Private Counternarratives in Cranford

This article re-examines the inner life of Miss Matty in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853).It posits that, throughout the novel, Miss Matty constructs fictional counternarratives to her own real life, which act as protective fictions allowing her to endure her status as a childless spinster. Therefore, she is able to emotionally process the differences between the life she expected and the one she has actually lived. While Dickens’s Miss Havisham reveals the unhealthy consequences of overindulgence in false counternarratives, and Gaskell’s Ruth shows the dangers of overreliance on counternarratives for physical safety, Miss Matty perfectly walks the line with her private constructions. Her adoption of widow’s caps following Holbrook’s death, even though they never married, acts as a key example of this process, alongside the many ways her behaviour establishes her as a maternal figure to several of Cranford’s residents. By privately assuming the roles of a wife, a widow, and a mother through her clothing and behaviour, she circumvents regret and fully participates within Cranford’s community. Her private counternarratives do not come into conflict with the reality of her life and in fact grant it further richness.