North and South
Margaret Hale moves from a Hampshire village to a northern manufacturing town and finds that her father's doubts, her own manners and the workers' wages are all part of the same argument. Gaskell sets her heroine between a mill owner and his hands and refuses to let either side be simply right.
The novel was serialised in Dickens's Household Words, and it shows: short chapters, strong scenes, a plot that keeps moving. What distinguishes it from other industrial fiction is the attention to domestic detail, the tea tables and sickrooms where political positions are actually formed.
Public-domain status
First published in 1855. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Elizabeth Gaskell died in 1865, so this work has been free to republish there since 1936.
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