North and South

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson) was born on 29 September 1810 in Chelsea, London. Her father William, was a civil servant. Her mother, Eliza, died on 29 October 1811 and she was brought up by Hannah Lumb, her aunt, in Knutsford, Cheshire, a small town near Manchester which later became the basis for Cranford.

In 1832 she married William Gaskell, who was a Unitarian minister and they settled in the industrial city of Manchester. They had several children: a stillborn daughter in 1833, followed by Marianne (1834), Margaret Emily (1837), known as Meta, Florence Elizabeth (1842), William (1844-1845) and Julia Bradford (1846).

After her only son, William, died of scarlet fever she began to write. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848. It was an immediate success, winning the praise of Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle.

Dickens invited her to contribute to his magazine, 'Household Words', where her next major work, Cranford, appeared in 1853. North and South was published the following year. Gaskell’s work brought her many friends, including the novelist Charlotte Brontë. When Charlotte died in 1855, her father, Patrick Brontë, asked Gaskell to write her biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857).

Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth’s final novel, was left unfinished when she died suddenly of heart failure on 12 November 1865 in Holybourne, Hampshire, aged 55.

"Gaskell saw the emotional and economic realities of ordinary life with a steely honesty" The Times "Ruth, North and South and Mary Barton are at least as good as any of Dickens's novels" -- Sara Paretsky "Pah! to Dickens. Eat your heart out, Little Nell. That Elizabeth Gaskell could write a death scene to make your socks melt" Scotsman "One of the most perceptive novels of the mid-Victorian era" Glasgow Herald "North And South explores themes that still seem strikingly modern. One hundred and fifty years after it appeared, the North-South divide - and the social and economic gulf it implies - remains intact" Daily Mail

From her home ground, her father's comfortably middle-class living in Hampshire and her aunt's establishment in Harley Street, Margaret is exiled to the ugly northern industrial town of Milton. Surprisingly, her social consciousness awakens. It is intensified by a relationship with the local mill-owner, Thornton, that combines passionate attraction with fierce opposition. The novel explores the exploitation of the working class, linking the plight of workers with that of women and probing the myth and reality of the 'north-south divide'.