North and South

This was a really interesting book. I wonder why she isn’t better-known in Australia? The only other book I’ve come across by her is Mary Barton, which was lent to me by a Britisher. I think my reaction was worthy but boring, though it may have just been not what I wanted to read at the time.

This particular story is worthy and not boring at all. It was originally to be called Margaret Hale, because it’s basically her story – she’s born in the South, loves her country hamlet, though spends her youth in London. Her parson father has a crisis of conscience, leaves his parish and becomes a tutor in the big bad North, a town called Milton (actually Manchester, apparently). Margaret and her parents must get used to the dirt and the poverty and the manners and the way of speech, and most of all the strange people there. It’s a bad time for poor Margaret – by the end of it, she loses both parents and a friend. On the other hand, she makes friends with both rich and poor, and meets Mr Thornton, a mill-owner who learns Plato from Margaret’s father. It’s a rather passionate affair, actually, with Mr Thornton keen on Margaret the whole way through while she hates him for exploiting the workers. In the end it turns out she doesn’t really hate him and he’s not such a bad employer. It’s a sort of Pride and Prejudice, but set among real issues of the war between workers and masters. Lots of dialogues and, best of all, in the end while both Margaret and Mr Thornton learn a lot and finally get together, nothing in the big wide world is really resolved.

There’s humour in it, though you have to dig for it, and there are many interesting studies of human beings, the poor and the rich, the northerners and the southerners, both men and women. Definitely a classic.