When her father has a crisis of faith and quits his position as a cleric in leafy Hampshire, Margaret and her difficult mother are sent north to reside beneath the black clouds of industry. Margaret must somehow create a new life for herself, but the presence of Mr Thornton, a factory owner, causes her much upset.

Thornton hopes to win Margaret's affections by becoming a 'gentleman' -- but Margaret finds herself repelled by his affectations, just as Thornton's mother sees Margaret as nothing more than a penniless hindrance to her son's illustrious career. Confrontations loom as the vast guls between poverty and wealth, north and south, have to be crossed . . .


This is #115 on the https://www.listchallenges.com/1001-books-you-must-read-2018 list.

I joined the "1001 Books to Read Before You Die" challenge just as my wife started a clear-out of her old books: I would not have read it otherwise.

Margaret's vicar father has a crisis of faith [like Gaskell's own father], and gives up his living in Hampshire, a land of Ambrosia, and becomes a tutor in a dirty industrial Northern mill town. Her mother, already unwell, takes a turn for the worse. Margaret befriends a sickly young girl, who also takes a turn for the worse. Margaret rebuffs the advances of a successful local mill owner largely because he's a mere merchant, in trade, rather than a gentleman. Everyone is a repressed Victorian emotional pygmy, and misunderstandings are inevitable, but Victorian pride and shame mean that they never resolve their differences, until magically, in the last 5 pages!

This is a book for Jane Austen fans, and not for a Northern man. The female characters are "gushing" and "wet", either raining tears or kisses. Gaskell propagates the stereotypes and snobbery about "the North" and invents a weird "Darkshire dialect" [despite, or maybe because ,Gaskell had lived in the North]

If this is a satire, like "Northanger Abbey", I'm afraid that it's gone over my head.

left in Marleen's Minibieb