North and South - Paperback

by Elizabeth Gaskell (Author), Jenny Uglow (Introduction by)

Milton is a sooty, noisy northern town centred around the cotton mills that employ most of its inhabitants. Arriving from a rural idyll in the south, Margaret Hale is initially shocked by the social unrest and poverty she finds in her new hometown. However, as she begins to befriend her neighbors, and her stormy relationship with the mill-owner John Thornton develops, she starts to see Milton in a different light.

Back Jacket

From her home ground, her father's comfortably middle-class living in Hampshire and her aunt's establishment in Harley Street, Margaret is exiled to the ugly northern industrial town of Milton. Surprisingly, her social consciousness awakens. It is intensified by a relationship with the local mill-owner, Thornton, that combines passionate attraction with fierce opposition. The novel explores the exploitation of the working class, linking the plight of workers with that of women and probing the myth and reality of the 'north-south divide'.

Author Biography

Along with short stories and a biography of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) published five more novels including Mary Barton (1848) and Wives and Daughters (1865). Jenny Uglow is the author of Elizabeth Gaskell and Hogarth--both shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize; The Lunar Men, which won the PEN Hessel-Tiltman prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Nature's Engraver.