North and South (1854) - Elizabeth Gaskell Audiobook

Written by Elizabeth Gaskell
Read by Kate Petrie
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

• Length: 16 hrs and 37 mins
• Release date: 06-21-16
• Publisher: A.R.N. Publications

Margaret Hale returns home to her family in the rural south of England, after living with a wealthy aunt for 10 years, learning how to become a proper young woman. She is not home for long before her life is uprooted and her family moves to a town called Milton, in Northern England, where her father intends to be a tutor, leaving their Pastoral life, and the Church of England behind.

One of Mr. Hale’s pupils, Mr. Thornton, runs the cotton mill and has taken a keen interest in Margaret, who is disgusted by the amount of poverty around Milton and, also, by the way Mr. Thornton treats his employees. Although an uprising is brooding and Margaret sympathizes with the workers, she starts to become fond of Thornton and his ambition after living for 18 months in Milton.

Margaret is surrounded by tragedy and loss from her family’s ailing health, and a secret she must never reveal. Her societal upbringing in the south begins to clash with the northern poverty and her morals are beginning to shift and polarize. When more death starts to intrude on Margaret’s life, she leaves Milton to return south to her Aunt where Margaret learns of a fortunate change of circumstance awaiting her that changes everything, including her relationship with Mr. Thornton.

North and South uses a protagonist from southern England to present and comment on the perspectives of mill owners and workers in an industrializing city. The novel is set in the fictional industrial town of Milton that is based on Manchester, a city Gaskill knew well. Her husband worked there the Unitarian minister.

Margaret Hale witnesses the brutal world wrought by the Industrial Revolution, seeing employers and workers clashing in the first strikes. Sympathetic to the poor (whose courage and tenacity she admires and among whom she makes friends), she clashes with John Thornton: a nouveau riche cotton-mill owner who is contemptuous of his workers.

The novel traces her growing understanding of the complexity of labour relations and their influence on well-meaning mill owners and her conflicted relationship with John Thornton.