Margaret is a well-educated country girl, and her mother is a typical upper-class housewife. Milton is dark and dirty, and full of poor workers right out in the open, coming as a shock to the Hales, who are used to poor people being genteelly out of sight, living in little cottages they can visit with a basket of food. Its protagonist is 19-year-old Margaret Hale, whose father, suffering a crisis of conscience, quits his job as a country parson in idyllic southern England and moves his wife and daughter north to the industrial cotton-mill town of Milton. North and South is a skillful synthesis of Dickensian social commentary and Austenian romance. Using personal passions to explore deep social divisions, North and South is a great romance and one of Elizabeth Gaskell's finest works.Įlizabeth Gaskell was apparently not as well known as some of her contemporaries until the 2004 BBC miniseries, which is a typical pretty period piece of the sort that was popular before BBC declared "No more bonnet dramas." But this throws her into direct conflict with the powerful young mill-owner, John Thornton. When Margaret Hale moves with her father from the comfort of the south of England to the industrial north, she is at first repulsed by what she sees and then when she discovers the conditions under which the workers are forced to live, she is outraged.
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