Review - North and South
This book was a relief after Defoe's Moll Flanders. For a book I had to read for class and didn't pick for myself, I liked it a lot. It helped that the religious ideology was one I could more readily get on with -- given that Moll Flanders is profoundly Calvinist, while Gaskell was a Unitarian, which shows in one line which stuck out for me: "Margaret the Churchwoman, her father the Dissenter, Higgins the Infidel, knelt down together. It did them no harm."
As a story, I enjoyed it. It reminded me rather of Charlotte Bronte -- perhaps not surprisingly, as that's one of my favourite books from the 1800s, and written by a woman in a man's world at around the same time. On the other hand, it's quite different. It doesn't seem to go anywhere much, and despite the climax being the coming together of two characters at last, the focus is far from being romance. It's a social novel, which I suppose leads into the more analytical stuff.
The big focus of the novel is binary opposites: North vs. South, the rich and respectable vs. the poor, etc. That comes through in all kinds of ways: dialect is an obvious one, but also less obviously the way they speak -- Margaret, for example, and Mr Hale, speak much more at length than the Thorntons. Character is another: there are several characters who are clearly meant to be exact opposites, such as Mrs Hale and Mrs Thornton, and Mrs Hale and Bessy Higgins.
It's quite interesting to read, and to see how far Elizabeth Gaskell went with it, and how she worked around the prejudices of her readers. I think I'd be interested to the see the BBC adaptation of the book.
As a story, I enjoyed it. It reminded me rather of Charlotte Bronte -- perhaps not surprisingly, as that's one of my favourite books from the 1800s, and written by a woman in a man's world at around the same time. On the other hand, it's quite different. It doesn't seem to go anywhere much, and despite the climax being the coming together of two characters at last, the focus is far from being romance. It's a social novel, which I suppose leads into the more analytical stuff.
The big focus of the novel is binary opposites: North vs. South, the rich and respectable vs. the poor, etc. That comes through in all kinds of ways: dialect is an obvious one, but also less obviously the way they speak -- Margaret, for example, and Mr Hale, speak much more at length than the Thorntons. Character is another: there are several characters who are clearly meant to be exact opposites, such as Mrs Hale and Mrs Thornton, and Mrs Hale and Bessy Higgins.
It's quite interesting to read, and to see how far Elizabeth Gaskell went with it, and how she worked around the prejudices of her readers. I think I'd be interested to the see the BBC adaptation of the book.