“Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used--not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.”

When her clergyman father decides to leave the Church, Margaret Hale is whisked away from her tranquil life in the rural south and brought to the gritty industrial town of Milton-Northern. Befriending the local union representative, the spirited Margaret soon learns about the hardships suffered by the workers at a nearby cotton mill. Caught up in a workers’ strike, she finds herself at odds with the mill’s owner, the wealthy John Thornton. But does their mutual animosity hide deeper feelings, or are they truly polar opposites?

A champion of social justice, Elizabeth Gaskell based her 1855 novel on the real-life conditions of the working poor in Manchester. The title North and South was chosen by Charles Dickens, reflecting the underlying conflict between modernity and tradition.

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