The plot, in a nutshell: shortly after this aborted proposal, Margaret’s parson father leaves the Church of England for “reasons of conscience,” uprooting his daughter and fragile wife to-shockingly-an industrial town in the north of England to become a tutor to local manufacturers bent on self-improvement. Margaret makes decisions for positive reasons only, never to honor convention or out of a sense of victimhood. But this refusal is key to her character. The protagonist of North and South is Margaret Hale, a refined country parson’s daughter who, in the novel’s opening chapters, refuses marriage to attractive lawyer Henry Lennox for the sole reason that “I have never thought of-you, but as a friend.” Margaret has average looks elevated into beauty by her aristocratic bearing, but limited social capital, and almost no actual capital. This is a novel I can’t quit, and can’t even skim.
In North and South, Gaskell makes social concerns the core of a love story that is wonderfully readable more than 150 years after its publication. These elements are present in Gaskell’s work, too, but she adds a generous social ethic and a talent for complex human drama. But in my opinion, she surpasses them all.Įliot has a superior knowledge of politics and a shrewd sense of community life, Austen has an ungodly talent for drawing-room drama, and the Brontës infuse gothic panoramas with intense sexual energy. Like her contemporaries, Gaskell uses the marriage plot as a vehicle for female self-actualization and empowerment.
Elizabeth Gaskell is a relatively unsung Victorian novelist, at least compared with Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot.
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