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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Summary At the heart of North and South is the relationship between the two main protagonists: proud ex-parson's daughter Margaret Hale and equally proud mill owner and industrialist John Thornton.
They have different backgrounds, different attitudes and different sensibilities. They represent different worlds - she the world of the gentry from the agrarian and intellectual south of England, he the self-made men of the industrial north.
They meet, they clash, they...

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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 lower class. It is subtitled "A Tale of Manchester Life."
The setting of the novel - Manchester between 1837 and 1842, torn apart by industrial strife between mill owners and factory hands - is inherently interesting.
Mrs. Gaskell shows how factory workers lived in...

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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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This is an intriguing read, not only because the historical background is well researched and the writing lively, but because everyone seems to interpret what the author was trying to accomplish differently.
It is set during the mid-1790s in the small coastal whaling community of 'Monkshaven' modeled on Whitby that Gaskell visited in 1859. The novel takes place during the early years of the Napoleonic wars that consumed England, and much of the world, for the next twenty years.
This is a...

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My Lady Ludlow recounts the daily lives of the widowed Countess of Ludlow of Hanbury and the spinster Miss Galindo, whose father was a Baronet, and their caring for other single women and girls. It is also concerned with Lady Ludlow's man of business, Mr Horner, and a poacher's son named Harry Gregson whose education he provides for.
This book was told from the point of view of Margaret Dawson who, at the age of sixteen, was taken in by her distant cousin Lady Ludlow. During the course...

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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...