As relevant now as when it was first published, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South skilfully weaves a compelling love story into a clash between the pursuit of profit and humanitarian ideals. When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the North of England.
Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. This is intensified by her tempestuous relationship with the mill-owner and self-made man John Thornton, as their fierce opposition over his treatment of his employees masks a deeper attraction.
In North and South Gaskell skilfully fused individual feeling with social concern, and in Margaret Hale created one of the most original heroines of Victorian literature.┬а
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (n├йe Stevenson; 29 September 1810 тАУ 12 November 1865), often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her work is of interest to social historians as well as readers of literature. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bront├л, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Bront├л. In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Bront├л's life; the rest she left out, deciding that certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden. Among Gaskell's best known novels are Cranford (1851тАУ53), North and South (1854тАУ55), and Wives and Daughters (1865), each having been adapted for television by the BBC.