North and South
Margaret Hale leaves the comfortable south of England for the industrial north, where her father has taken a mill-town parish. She hates everything about Milton: the smoke, the noise, the blunt manners of the workers — and most of all, mill-owner John Thornton.
What Makes This Book Essential
Gaskell's novel is Pride and Prejudice transplanted into the Industrial Revolution, and the transplant charges every scene with new voltage. The romance between Margaret and Thornton crackles with genuine tension — two proud, intelligent people who are each wrong about the other in interesting ways.
But the romance is secondary to Gaskell's real subject: the relationship between capital and labor, between the mill-owners who built England's industrial wealth and the workers whose bodies paid for it. Margaret is caught between both worlds — educated enough to see the injustice, wealthy enough to intervene, brave enough to act. When she steps between the strikers and the soldiers, it is one of Victorian fiction's most startling moments.
North and South was originally serialized in Dickens's Household Words, and Dickens — no one's idea of a feminist — repeatedly tried to soften Gaskell's portrait of Margaret's strength. She refused. The result is a heroine who makes Jane Bennet look passive.
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