North and South

'How am I to dress up in my finery, and go off and away to smart parties, after the sorrow I have seen today?'

Margaret Hale is wrenched from her beloved rural idyll of Helstone and moved with her family to the industrial northern town of Milton, with its grime and all the ugliness of urban life. But from her initial distaste, Margaret develops a new sense of social justice, and a complicated relationship with the mill-owner John Thornton.

First published in 1855, North and South has one of the most full, original heroines in Victorian literature, and spurned the contemporary conventions of the novel to give a compelling, nuanced view of class conflict without easy resolution.

About the Author

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65) herself moved from South to North in her youth, from the London of her childhood to Knutsford and later Manchester. Writer of six novels, numerous short stories and novellas and the biography of her great friend Charlotte Bronte, Gaskell was at first published anonymously but later in her own name. Much of her work was serialised in Charles Dickens's widely-read literary weekly, Household Words. Gaskell's novels Mary Barton, Cranford and Wives and Daughters are also published in the Penguin English Library.