North and South - Hardcover

by Elizabeth Gaskell (Author), Kathryn White (Introduction by)

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. This edition features an afterword by Kathryn White.

One of literature's greatest romances, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell is both an incisive social commentary and an electric portrayal of all-conquering love.

Forced to move from the rural tranquillity of southern England to the turbulent northern mill town of Milton, Margaret Hale takes an instant dislike to the dirt and noise that seems to characterize her new home and its inhabitants - even the handsome and charismatic cotton mill owner, John Thornton. But as she begins to settle in, and to understand the nature of the surrounding poverty and injustice, events conspire to throw her and Thornton together. Amidst the chaos of industrial unrest, they must learn to overcome the prejudices of class and circumstance and admit their feelings for one another.

Author Biography

Mrs Gaskell was born Elizabeth Stevenson in London in 1810. Her mother Eliza, the niece of the potter Josiah Wedgwood, died when she was a child. Much of her childhood was spent in Cheshire, where she lived with an aunt at Knutsford, a town she would later immortalise as Cranford. In 1832, she married a Unitarian minister, William Gaskell (who had a literary career of his own), and they settled in Manchester. The industrial surroundings offered her inspiration for her novels. The best-known of her other novels are Cranford (1853) and North and South (1855). Gaskell was also a skilled proponent of the ghost story. Her last novel, Wives and Daughters, said by many to be her most mature work, remained unfinished at the time of her death in 1865.