Elizabeth Gaskell published North and South in serial form in 1854-55. Margaret Hale, raised in the comfortable rural south of England, is transplanted to Milton-Northern, a fictionalized Manchester, when her father, a clergyman, leaves the Church of England on grounds of conscience and becomes a private tutor. In the industrial north, Margaret encounters John Thornton, a cotton mill owner who has built his business from nothing and who embodies the values of Northern manufacturing culture: self-reliance, directness, and a kind of honest contempt for the social performances she was raised to make. He falls in love with her and she initially refuses him, in part through class prejudice against his trade background and in part because his treatment of striking workers conflicts with her sympathy for the laborers she has come to know personally.
The novel takes the structure of misunderstanding leading to mutual education that Austen had established and applies it to the industrial setting that Austen never addressed. The strike sequences are Gaskell's most substantial engagement with the labor politics of mid-Victorian Britain, she had direct experience of Manchester mill workers through her husband's Unitarian ministry, and they serve as the ground on which Margaret and Thornton's different frameworks are tested against each other. Neither is simply right: Margaret's instinct to protect Higgins and his daughter from Thornton's economic logic is sympathetic but does not account for the structural pressures Thornton is working within.
North and South is sometimes described as Gaskell's answer to Dickens's Hard Times, with a more integrated view of the relationship between labor and capital. What gives it continuing relevance is the way it handles disagreement between people of genuine intelligence and good faith. Thornton changes his management practices not because he is converted to socialism but because his friendship with Higgins allows him to see his workers as individuals rather than as economic inputs, and that change is shown as practically beneficial rather than sentimentally redemptive. The novel takes the economics seriously enough to make the romantic plot feel earned rather than escapist.
The Age of Innocence made Edith Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1921.
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