north and south

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (Penguin Classics, 1981)

Disappointing.  I’ve read about 2/3 of it, and I’ve had enough.  The writing is undistinguished, and the plot and characters feeble and annoying.  Our heroine, Margaret Gale, is too much loved and revered by her creator: she is beautiful and noble and intelligent and patient and moral and kind and too angelic by three quarters.  The contrived plot brings her from a comfortable life in southern England (London and the idyllic New Forest) to Milton, Darkshire, in northern England, an industrial town (read Manchester).  Her suitor, John Thornton, is a merchant mill owner who is being tutored by her defrocked father.  A series of unbelievable — preposterous, really — coincidences succeeded in severing any ties I felt to the story and characters, which is a shame, because the material here (the way the rise of industry in England affected the class structure and how people coped romantically and economically as a result) deserves a more subtle and complex treatment.