Cranford

Journey to Mrs Jamieson’s Home

The narrator describes the route to Mrs Jamieson’s large house just outside town, which faces a former street that never sees the sun and whose front windows belong only to servants’ rooms, where Mr Mulliner is glimpsed reading the St James’s Chronicle. The ladies pass Mr Mulliner with great nervous deference, daring only a timid joke for his amusement, and climb the stairs in enforced gravity under his wooden gaze.

Meeting Lady Glenmire at the Party

Inside Mrs Jamieson’s cheerful drawing-room, filled with evening sun and furnished in stiff white-and-gold Georgian style, Lady Glenmire rescues the awkward gathering by helping seat the guests around the fire. Once the Cranford ladies have time to observe her, Lady Glenmire proves to be a bright, pleasant-looking woman of middle age who had once been very pretty, and Miss Pole begins to appraise her dress.

第八章

This opening section of Chapter VIII establishes the Cranford ladies’ initial mixed reactions to Lady Glenmire, a peeress married to a man who has never sat in the House of Lords. The group is partly comforted by the realization that a peeress could be quite poor, which eases their earlier resentment at what they saw as a deceptive false pretense of noble status that misled them about their social prospects. They fall silent as they struggle to select a conversation topic suitably prestigious to engage their noble guest.

Peeress’s Modest Attire

Peeress’s Modest Attire The chapter opens with a remark underscoring Lady Glenmire’s extremely modest, inexpensive wardrobe: every item of clothing she wears, including her lace, could be purchased for no more than ten pounds total, a far cry from the lavish attire the ladies might expect of a noblewoman.