Recommendations
Books Like North and South
Best books to read after North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Readers who love North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell are drawn to its combination of the most intellectually sustained condition-of-England investigation in Victorian fiction, the industrial confrontation between North and South, and the courtship of two equally matched, equally proud, and equally intelligent people who begin in contempt and arrive at love. They want works that deal with the industrial question in Victorian England, the courtship novel organized around intellectual equality, and the provincial social world that Gaskell draws with such specificity.
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Wives and Daughters
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell's companion last novel — Molly Gibson and Roger Hamley. The companion as the fullest realization of Gaskell's novelistic talent: where North and South is the politically engaged and dramatic version, Wives and Daughters is the social-comedic and novelistic version of the same sympathetic investigation
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Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Austen's companion — Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. The companion courtship novel as the predecessor: Margaret Hale and John Thornton are the Victorian and industrial version of Elizabeth and Darcy — both pairs of intelligent, proud, equally matched people who begin in mutual contempt and arrive at mutual respect and love
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Mary Barton
by Elizabeth Gaskell
The companion — Mary Barton in the Manchester slums. The companion as the predecessor in the same investigation: where North and South investigates the industrial question from all perspectives (employer, employee, Southern outsider), Mary Barton investigates it from the workers' perspective alone
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's companion masterpiece — the provincial social world and a woman whose intelligence exceeds what her world has prepared her for. The companion as the fullest realization of the same investigation: both novels are organized around the relationship between intelligence, aspiration, and the social world that simultaneously enables and limits it
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Hard Times
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's companion investigation of the same industrial England — Gradgrind and Coketown. The companion as the satirical version: where Gaskell's approach is sympathetic and dialectical (presenting both Thornton's and the workers' perspectives as legitimate), Dickens's approach is satirical and polemical
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Cranford
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell's companion — the ladies of Cranford. The companion as the comedic and elegiac version of the same Cheshire world: where North and South investigates the confrontation between industrial modernity and the old order, Cranford is organized around the last survivors of the old order
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Shirley
by Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë's companion investigation of the industrial North — Yorkshire mill owners during the Luddite riots. The companion as the Brontë version: both novels are organized around the condition-of-England question and both pair an independent, intellectual woman with a strong, self-made man of the commercial class
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Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's companion pastoral — Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors. The companion as the later investigation of the same central question (what becomes of an independent, self-willed woman who must navigate the men and social world around her?) organized through the Dorset agricultural world rather than the Manchester industrial world
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