Reading Order
North and South Reading Order
Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854–1855) is a standalone novel serialized in Charles Dickens's magazine Household Words, following Margaret Hale, the daughter of a Dissenting clergyman who moves from the comfortable rural south of England to the harsh industrial north, and her antagonistic relationship with the mill owner John Thornton. One of the great Victorian novels of social conscience and romantic conflict.
Where to start
North and South
Complete North and South Book List
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North and South
Elizabeth Gaskell·1854·The complete novel. Entirely standalone. - Buy
Mary Barton
OptionalElizabeth Gaskell·1848·Gaskell's first novel — a Manchester factory girl whose father kills a mill owner's son; a darker and more explicitly political novel about the industrial North than North and South, and the book that established Gaskell's reputation. - Buy
Wives and Daughters
OptionalElizabeth Gaskell·1866·Molly Gibson, the doctor's daughter, navigates a country society transformed by the arrival of ambitious outsiders — Gaskell's final novel (unfinished at her death) and widely considered her masterpiece; quieter than North and South but more psychologically detailed. - Buy
Cranford
OptionalElizabeth Gaskell·1851·A series of linked sketches about the women of a small English village — Gaskell's most charming work; very different in tone from North and South but equally revealing of her compassion and social observation.
North and South — Frequently Asked Questions
Is North and South a romance?
North and South is both a social novel and a romance, and the two elements are inseparable rather than in tension. The relationship between Margaret and Thornton is built on class antagonism (she is a clergyman's daughter from the cultivated south; he is a self-made manufacturer from the industrial north whose world she finds brutal and whose manner she finds presumptuous) and on genuine intellectual and moral disagreement about the obligations of employers to workers. Their romantic development tracks their social education: Thornton becomes a better employer as he falls in love with Margaret; Margaret loses her class condescension as she comes to understand what Thornton has built and what the workers' lives require. The novel is designed so that the romance is the social argument made personal — the reader believes in their love partly because they believe in the rightness of what each has learned from the other.
How does North and South compare to Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice?
North and South is regularly grouped with Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice as one of the great Victorian novels of a strong female protagonist who must educate a proud hero before the marriage plot can resolve. The comparisons are illuminating: Margaret shares Jane Eyre's moral certainty and willingness to refuse what is wrongly offered; she shares Elizabeth Bennet's intellectual sharpness and initial prejudice against her hero. But North and South is more explicitly social than either: where Austen is almost entirely concerned with the dynamics of provincial English society, and Brontë with psychological and Gothic intensity, Gaskell is directly engaged with the Industrial Revolution and the class conflict it produced. Thornton's mill workers are part of the novel's moral argument in a way that has no equivalent in Austen or Brontë.
Is there a good adaptation of North and South?
The 2004 BBC television adaptation, starring Daniela Denby-Ashe as Margaret and Richard Armitage as Thornton, is widely considered one of the best literary adaptations in BBC history and has introduced many readers to Gaskell who had not previously encountered her work. The four-episode miniseries is unusually faithful to the novel while condensing its social argument into the visual and romantic terms that television requires; Armitage's performance as Thornton — physically imposing but internally vulnerable — became one of the defining romantic portrayals in British television. The adaptation's most famous scene (the Manchester railway station farewell) is an invention not found in the novel but faithful to its spirit. Many readers who watch the adaptation first find that it enhances rather than replaces the pleasure of reading the novel.
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