By: Elizabeth Gaskell
Publisher: Dover Publications
ISBN: 9780486479521
Pub Date: June 13, 2012
Pages: 464
Buy Link: Barnes & Nobles
If you are looking for a good read and you enjoy the novels of Jane Austen, then look no further than Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. Written around the same time as Austen’s works, this novel delves deeper into class conflicts, the unions, the hard work of laborers, and even the hero’s inner psyche. The supporting characters are stronger than most of Austen’s and you really grow to care about their struggles.
The main idea of the novel is that a pastor’s daughter, Margaret Hale, is transported along with her ailing mother and now jobless father from her quiet and comfortable home in the south of England to the crowded, dirty, and chaotic north. She must find her spot in this new society, and befriends a mill worker and his dying daughter. Her father starts tutoring a mill master, a man named Thornton, how quickly becomes smitten with the beautiful and headstrong Margaret. She rejects him, however, because she has seen the ordeal that the mill workers are put through.
