Pour yourself a cup of tea and settle in for "Cranford" on PBS

Her peers the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen are better known and more revered today. But in her day, Elizabeth Gaskell's well-observed (and female-centered) tales of mid-19th-century England were warmly embraced by readers and critics alike.

In the addictive series "Cranford," the BBC does its utmost to burnish Gaskell's reputation. The show has its U.S. debut on PBS' "Masterpiece" over the next three Sundays.

A conflation of three Gaskell novellas set in Cranford (a rural Cheshire town based on the village of Knutsford), it was a huge 2007 hit in Britain. And it has the classy production values of the BBC's best "bonnet and teacup" series.

The dream cast alone justifies a rendezvous with Cranford's dominant women and second-fiddle men. As genteel "spinster" sisters, Dame Judi Dench charms playing sweet,shy Matty, while Eileen Atkins excels as the flinty, decorum-obsessed Deborah.

Other noted Cranfordians: the gossip queen Miss Pole (a wickedly comic Imelda Staunton); lovable Simon Woods, as a young doctor who sets hearts aflutter; and Francesca Annis, elegantly wan and snooty as an aristocrat resistant to change.

Heidi Thomas wrote the teleplay, but the show's major components, and some of its best dialogue, are straight from the pen of Gaskell. Another British novelist, Virginia Woolf, summarized Gaskell's literary legacy this way: "One reads her most perhaps because one wishes to have the run of her world. Melt them together and her books comprise a large, bright, country town, widely paved, with a great stir of life in the streets and a decorous row of old Georgian houses standing back from the road."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com