In this chapter I set out my rationale for examining two apparently dichotomous aspects of Elizabeth Gaskell’s short stories: her failed fathers and her travel writing. The analysis links these themes by examining the ways in which Gaskell used a complex mix of unstable cultural ideas to demonstrate the fragility of home and family life and to challenge gendered norms. Fathers are presented as a disruptive force, breaking rather than creating a stable, secure family environment. Their behaviour becomes a motivator for travel as an escape from home. Travellers enter the guarded, enclosed world of Cranford to agitate and unsettle the inhabitants and force them to accept changes that embrace a more fluid concept of gender rather than their previous binary self-protective polarity. I focus on Gaskell’s short stories for two reasons. First, they remain relatively under-investigated by scholars. Second, shorter fiction enabled women writers in particular, to be less constrained, less observed, their texts less commented on. They demonstrate, perhaps to an even greater extent than the novels, Gaskell’s creativity, her narrative genius and textual fluidity, her refusal to be constrained by convention.