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Margaret Hale is wrenched from her beloved rural idyll of Helstone and moved with her family to the industrial northern town of Milton, with its grime and all the ugliness of urban life. But from her initial distaste, Margaret develops a new sense of social justice, and a complicated relationship with the mill-owner John Thornton.

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The Penguin English Library edition of North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

´How am I to dress up in my finery, and go off and away to smart parties, after the sorrow I have seen today?´

Elizabeth Gaskell´s compassionate, richly dramatic novel features one of the most original and fully-rounded female characters in Victorian fiction, Margaret Hale. It shows how, forced to move from the country to an industrial northern town, she develops a passionate sense of social justice, and a turbulent relationship with mill-owner John Thornton. North and South depicts a young woman discovering herself, in a nuanced portrayal of what divides people, and what brings them together.

The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

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Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65) herself moved from South to North in her youth, from the London of her childhood to Knutsford and later Manchester. Writer of six novels, numerous short stories and novellas and the biography of her great friend Charlotte Bront‰, Gaskell was at first published anonymously but later in her own name. Much of her work was serialised in Charles Dickens´s widely-read literary weekly, Household Words.

Gaskell´s novels Mary Barton, Cranford and Wives and Daughters are also published in the Penguin English Library.

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