North and South
Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel, originally serialized in Charles Dickens's magazine Household Words, follows Margaret Hale, the cultured daughter of a southern English clergyman, who is uprooted from a Hampshire vicarage when her father resigns his living over a crisis of conscience and moves the family north to the fictional industrial city of Milton. There Margaret is plunged into the smoke, strikes, and class antagonisms of Lancashire's cotton mills, and there she meets John Thornton, a self-made manufacturer whose worldview is exactly the one she has been raised to look down on. The novel uses their long, prickly disagreement to lay out one of the most balanced fictional treatments of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, and underneath it Gaskell builds a slow-burning romance that critics still rank with anything Austen wrote. The 2004 BBC adaptation cemented the book's modern readership.
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The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
When her father leaves the Church of England, Margaret Hale moves with him from a quiet southern village to the gritty northern mill town of Milton. There she meets and clashes with John Thornton, a self-made millowner.
Yes. North and South was first serialized from 1854 to 1855 and is in the public domain. Free editions are available legally through Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, and similar archives.
Yes. The BBC's 2004 four-part adaptation starring Daniela Denby-Ashe and Richard Armitage is widely considered one of the great Victorian literary adaptations and helped bring Gaskell wider modern attention.
North and South was written by Elizabeth Gaskell, published in 2017 by Independently Published.
North and South is 632 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, North and South takes most readers 9 to 14 hours to finish.
North and South is a standalone novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, not part of a series.
North and South is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
