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North & South

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Set amid the rapidly changing social, spiritual, and moral landscape of the industrial revolution, North and South is a forceful, brilliant, and romantic novel about freedom and the cost of profit.

When Margaret Hale, a minister’s daughter, relocates with her family to Milton in the north of England she witnesses firsthand the brutal working conditions in Milton’s factories and mills. Her liberal education has given her strong convictions, but little common sense, and her pity finds a mostly unsympathetic ear among the gruff mill workers and their families. 

Magaret is most vexed by a local industrialist and mill-owner, John Thornton, whom she considers contemptuous and bull-headed. But through her clashes with Thornton and her growing affinity for the workers and their plight for survival, Margaret comes to see the world as a much more complicated place, and that her earlier pity was not charity but a kind of arrogance.

Thunderously philosophical and compulsively readable, North and South is a vivid portrayal of not only unthinking conformity or selfish individualism, but the power of vulnerability and change.

443 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 6, 2025

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About the author

Elizabeth Gaskell

1,155 books3,790 followers
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, née Stevenson (29 September 1810 – 12 November 1865), often referred to simply as Mrs. Gaskell, was an English novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and as such are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature.

AKA:
Елізабет Гаскелл (Ukrainian)

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