Elizabeth Gaskell

Chances are good that Gaskell won't be on your exam, but there's always a chance . . .

Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848. The best-known of her remaining novels are Cranford (1853), North and South (1855), and Wives and Daughters (1865). She was a friend of Charles Dickens, and wrote the first biography of Charlotte Brontë, which played a significant role in developing her fellow writer's reputation..

North and South

North and South is a social novel that tries to show the industrial north and its conflicts in the mid-nineteenth century as seen by an outsider, a socially sensitive lady from the south. The story: the heroine, Margaret Hale, is the daughter of a Nonconformist minister who moves to the fictional industrial town of Milton after leaving the Church of England. The town is modeled after Manchester where Gaskell lives as the wife of a minister. The change of lifestyle shocks Margaret, who sympathises deeply with the poverty of the workers and comes into conflict with John Thornton, the owner of a local mill, also a friend of a friend of his father. As a result of an encounter with a group of strikers, where she exposes herself before the strikers, he tells that he is in love with her, but she rejects his proposal of marriage, mainly because she sees it as if it were out of obligation for what she had done. Later, he sees her with her brother, whom he mistakes for another suitor, and quarrels with her for that. Margaret, once she believes she has lost his affection, begins to see him in another light, and eventually they are reunited.