Sarah's Reviews > North and South

North and South opens in London, where Margaret Hale’s cousin Edith has just gotten married. While close to the pretty, sanguine, frivolous Edith, nineteen-year-old Margaret has been blessed with brains and empathy as well as beauty—and like most people so abundantly gifted, she’s a bit full of herself.

No longer required as her cousin’s companion, Margaret gets shipped back home to the little town of Helston, where her father is the vicar—only to discover soon after that he’s had a crisis of faith and feels compelled to leave the Church of England.

Mr. Hale takes a job tutoring in a Northern factory town called Milton, where he soon moves the family. Mrs. Hale quickly sickens in the climate extremes and smoky air of her new home. Margaret is disgusted by what strikes her as a crude and callous culture, as exemplified by a pupil of her father’s, one Mr. Thornton.

John Thornton is a rising star among factory bosses. At thirty years old, he’s young for his job but old to be reading Homer and Plutarch for the first time, as he does under Mr. Hale’s tutelage. Margaret sees him as a shallow, sometimes cruel man, who cares nothing for his workers (workers like Nicholas Higgins and his dying daughter Bessie, whom Margaret befriends). But she also disdains Thornton for his being a businessman in the first place.

Thornton is attracted to Margaret immediately, but, like Mr. Darcy, he doesn’t have the “happy manners that enable [him] to recommend [him]self to strangers.” He reaches out to her, but he’s awkward and moody. She becomes convinced that he sees her as an object, with no more soul than the cotton fluffs clogging the air inside his mill, and therefore believes herself justified in being a complete ice queen to him. He is eventually forced by this strong and unfamiliar emotion to propose to her. She shoots him down with the chilly indignation of (to use another reviewer’s comparison) Artemis chasing off Actaeon.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Hale gets sicker and sicker, and begs to see her son Frederick before she dies. But Frederick was part of a navy mutiny against a cruel captain and has been living in exile in Spain, knowing he could be hung if he sets foot in England again.

And John Boucher, a poor and gentle man broken by the system, wonders desperately how he can possibly keep his wife and increasing number of children fed when both the bosses and the rising Union have cast him out.

Gaskell takes an Austenian plotline of a man and a woman misunderstanding each other and drops it in the middle of a Dickensian hellhole. The desolation of Milton, and its poorer inhabitants who have never known a world outside what Blake termed the “dark satanic mills”, is vividly evoked. Like Persephone, Margaret is forced from a verdant, flowering country to a harsh, grey world of strife and sorrow. A girl sheltered all her life from death now has five deaths in quick succession dumped on her head.

But here lies the beauty of the novel: for Margaret, who started out sympathetic only to the workers and loathing their nouveau riche bosses, learns to see everyone’s point of view. This allows her to reach across the artificial lines caused by class or allegiance to the Union, able to help whoever needs it. She also learns, as she gets to know John Thornton better, that she has misjudged him horribly—and that her heart knows no peace without him.

Once you have oriented yourself to the Victorian mode of storytelling—long paragraphs, slow pace, and compulsively detailed physical descriptions of characters—the book is hard to put down. You’ll be drawn into Margaret’s world, and bleak though it is, you won’t want to leave. The ending is a bit abrupt, but that’s not Gaskell’s fault. She wanted a few more chapters to tie up loose ends and show the softening of Thornton more, but the novel was being published serially, and her editor/publisher—an obscure fellow by the name of Charles Dickens—told her she needed to wrap it up.

I recommend this book to anyone who loves English and/or nineteenth century literature. Gaskell is more than worthy to stand with Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and the Brontës, and it was only the overweening misogyny of lit critics that has barred her from their company for so long.

The BBC made a miniseries of this novel in 2004, which is engrossing and only has the smallest deviations from the novel. The characters are perfectly cast, the cinematography is excellent, and the score will haunt you.