North & South

Elizabeth Gaskell

Set amid the rapidly changing social, spiritual, and moral landscape of the industrial revolution, North & South is a forceful, brilliant, and romantic novel about freedom and the cost of profit.

When Margaret Hale, a minister’s daughter, relocates with her family to Milton in the north of England she witnesses firsthand the brutal working conditions in Milton’s factories and mills. Her liberal education has given her strong convictions, but little common sense, and her pity finds a mostly unsympathetic ear among the gruff mill workers and their families. 

Margaret is most vexed by a local industrialist and mill-owner, John Thornton, whom she considers contemptuous and bull-headed. But through her clashes with Thornton and her growing affinity for the workers and their plight for survival, Margaret comes to see the world as a much more complicated place, and that her earlier pity was not charity but a kind of arrogance.

Thunderously philosophical and compulsively readable, North and South is a vivid portrayal of not only unthinking conformity or selfish individualism, but the power of vulnerability and change.

In conversation with

Adrienne Garcia-Specht is a writer and Elizabeth Gaskell enthusiast. She earned a master’s degree in English from Syracuse University and lives on California’s Central Coast.

Morgan Spector is an actor and producer who is best known for his leading role as George Russell in The Gilded Age.