North and South

When Margaret Hale leaves the soft green south of England for the smoke and clamor of the northern mill town of Milton, she meets a world she is not prepared to like. Elizabeth Gaskell sets her heroine against the cotton master John Thornton and watches the two clash over the rights of workers, the duties of owners, and the strikes that turn the streets tense. What begins in mutual pride slowly becomes something harder to name. Serialized in Dickens’s magazine and published as a book in 1855, the novel weighs the human cost of the Industrial Revolution while telling a love story that earns its ending. This free PDF and EPUB edition contains the complete work.