If you like: Jane Austen, costume dramas, strong female characters, rebellion, romance, Bronte sisters.
Dear “North and South,” why do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Even if I have never lived in England during the mid-1800s and I would never read a textbook on what it was like to live in England during the mid-1800s, thanks to you, I have enough confidence to fake an expertise on life in England during the mid-1800s. Aristocrats and gardens in the south, factories and an emerging working class in the north, mutinies at sea and in the parish. The story is part of a fascinating cultural shift and you make it so engaging I don’t even realize I’m learning something until everyone has kissed and made up.
You are soap opera to the max. So many misunderstandings, lingering illnesses, sudden death, thrown objects, I love you, I don’t love, I love you but your mother will never let us be together. Awesome.
Elizabeth Gaskell has built more than one novel on the shoulders of a woman with good intentions who is held back by both society’s expectations as well as her own lack of what we nowadays call “street smarts.” Good intentions aren’t always enough, but an ability to learn and change get these women to where they need to go. Or they die, but let’s not talk about that other novel right now. We’re talking about you.
You have been dismissed as “just a romance,” but there’s nothing “just” about you. The two people in question struggle with not fitting in prescribed roles, but they find a better way through challenging each other and looking out for each other and learning how to communicate. According to Wikipedia, critic Stoneman called it “balanced emancipation.” And if there’s a paragraph spent on Thornton’s fascination with the way Margaret’s bracelet slides down her arm, why not? Love is as real a thing as despair and coal-grimed windows.
Look, I once spent an enjoyable trip to Los Angeles reading quotes from “Hard Times” to my cousin. It’s a pretty quotable book. Charles Dickens knew what he was doing. I am very interested in his insistence, though, that you be called “North and South” instead of “Margaret Hale.” Because you are both -- you are about the big picture, but it is told through the story of one woman. I’d like to say that’s a product of your time, the thought that one woman isn’t big enough to encapsulate such grand themes. But you know better.
You offer no easy answers -- whether it's on difficult mothers or the pitfalls of capitalism -- but one happy ending.
"North and South" by Elizabeth Gaskell; originally published in 1855.
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