North and South

Description

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JENNY UGLOW Milton is a sooty, noisy northern town centred around the cotton mills that employ most of its inhabitants. Arriving from a rural idyll in the south, Margaret Hale is initially shocked by the social unrest and poverty she finds in her new hometown. However, as she begins to befriend her neighbours, and her stormy relationship with the mill-owner John Thornton develops, she starts to see Milton in a different light.

Elizabeth Gaskell (Author) Louisa May Alcott was born on 29 November 1832 in Pennsylvania. Her father was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau. Alcott started selling stories in order to help provide financial support for her family. Her first book was Flower Fables (1854). She worked as a nurse during the American Civil War and in 1863 she published Hospital Sketches, which was based on her experiences. Little Women was published in 1868 and was based on her life growing up with her three sisters. She followed it with three sequels, Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886) and she also wrote other books for both children and adults. Louisa May Alcott was an abolitionist and a campaigner for women's rights. She died on 6 March 1888. Elizabeth Gaskell was born on 29 September 1810 in London. She was brought up in Knutsford, Cheshire by her aunt after her mother died when she was two years old. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, who was a Unitarian minister like her father. After their marriage they lived in Manchester with their children. Elizabeth Gaskell published her first novel, Mary Barton, in 1848 to great success. She went on to publish much of her work in Charles Dickens's magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round. Along with short stories and a biography of Charlotte Bronte, she published five more novels including North and South (1855) and Wives and Daughters (1866). Wives and Daughters is unfinished as Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly of heart failure on 12 November 1865. Jenny Uglow (Introducer) Jenny Uglow writes on literature, art, and social history. Her books include award-winning biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth and Thomas Bewick, as well as a study of Sarah Losh, a surprising Victorian architect and visionary,and group studies including The Lunar Men and the panoramic In These Times- Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815. She is now writing on Edward Lear. Jenny lives in Canterbury, and has four grown-up children and seven grandchildren. She was created an OBE in 2008, and was Chair of the Royal Society of Literature 2014-2016.

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 *