Mrs. Gaskell portrays industrial conditions in various regions of England in this nineteenth-century psychological novel
Margaret Hale moves with her upper-class family to a provincial industrial town in northern England. There she becomes involved in the lives of local factory workers and union members, at one point even participating in a strike. A stormy and difficult romantic relationship with a factory owner, John Thornton, ends happily after Thornton changes his mind about the rights of his workers and begins to treat them with respect. In NORTH AND SOUTH, written in 1854, Elizabeth Gaskell--like Dickens--sought to expose the social problems created by the Industrial Revolution. The book is notable for not only its socially aware story line but its robust and distinctive characters, in particular its thoughtful, courageous heroine.
- Genre: Fiction + Literature Genres, Fiction + Literature Themes, Romance
- Subgenre: Literary, General, Literary Genres + Types of Novels, Historical Romance
- Publisher: Penguin Classics
- Pages: 450
- Language: English
- Format: paperback
- Release Date: January 1, 1996
- Date Published: January 1, 1996
- Author: Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell