Lesa Scholl, Emily Morris, and Sarina Gruver, 95–106. In Place and Progress in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. Moving between north and south: Cultural signs and the Progress of modernity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel. Servants and paternalism in the works of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell. In The Cambridge companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. Worlds enough: The invention of realism in the Victorian novel.

Elizabeth Gaskell and the English provincial novel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Ĭraik, W.A. The politics of story in Victorian social fiction. While industrial relations serve as a focal point in Gaskell’s text, North and South. When she becomes involved in a strike at a mill owned by John Thornton, Margaret literally and symbolically acts as a mediator, precipitating what critics have described as North and South’s case for “new models of class relations” (Bodenheimer 1991). Catapulted into the noisy, smoky, and constantly moving world of the textile industry, Margaret’s prejudices about the brash and ungenteel north are initially confirmed but then upended. The narrative follows the physical and philosophical journey of Gaskell’s protagonist, Margaret Hale, from the south of England to the north – from a grand house in Harley Street, London, and then her childhood home, a country parsonage in Helstone, Hampshire – to Milton, in the bleak-sounding county of Darkshire. Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South was her fourth novel, serialized in Household Words from 1854 to 1855 and published in two volumes in 1855.

North and south gaskell novel