North and South is a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, first published weekly in Dickens' Household Worlds in twenty-two parts from September 1854 to January 1855. The story revolves around Margaret Hale, only daughter of a former parson. Margaret and her parents move to Milton, a factory town in the North of England, where they meet a proud, self-made factory owner, John Thornton.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, 29 September 1810 - 12 November 1865), often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte, published in 1857, was the first biography about Bronte. Some of Gaskell's best known novels are Cranford (1851-53), North and South (1854-55), and Wives...

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell...... North and South is a social novel by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. Along with Wives and Daughters (1865) and Cranford (1853), it is one of her best known novels and has been adapted for television twice, in 1975 and 2004. The latter version renewed interest in the novel and gained it a wider audience. While Gaskell's first novel Mary Barton (1848) focused on relations between employers and workers in Manchester from the perspective of the working poor, North and South uses a protagonist from southern England to present and comment on the...

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Cranford follows a group of women living in the small fictional town of Cranford. The women live in -genteel poverty- and have very old-fashioned mindsets about life and social niceties and norms.
The book is told from the perspective of Mary Smith (or Elizabeth Gaskell), and focuses mainly on Miss Matty, a sweet-tempered older woman who is one of the pillars of society since the death of her older, revered sister Deborah Jenkyns.
Cranford is a village of people who, at the risk of...

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Cousin Phillis is a lovely little novella about a young man's coming of age and his growing friendship with his cousin Phillis who lives on a farm in Northern England and his boss Holdsworth who is an engineer.
Gaskell is a wonderful painter of words and with deft strokes of her brush is able to impart to a contemporary reader what life in pastoral England in the mid-nineteenth century was like.
She is able to convey in such a short book what life on a farm is like but also what...

Elizabeth Gaskell By Elizabeth Gaskell Edited by Lacey Belinda Smith

Mary Barton is the first novel by English author Elizabeth Gaskell, published in 1848. The story is set in the English city of Manchester between 1839 and 1842, and deals with the difficulties faced by the Victorian working class. It is subtitled "A Tale of Manchester Life." The novel begins in Manchester, where we are introduced to the Bartons and the Wilsons, two working-class families. John Barton is a questioner of the distribution of wealth and the relations between rich and poor. Soon his wife dies-he blames it on her grief over the disappearance of her sister Esther. Having already...