She witnesses the brutal world wreaked by the Industrial Revolution, seeing employers and workers clashing in the first strikes.

Forced to leave her home in the tranquil, rural south, Margaret Hale settles with her parents in Milton. The novel is set in the fictional industrial town of Milton in the north of England. Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton (1848), focused on relations between employers and workers in Manchester from the perspective of the working poor North and South uses a protagonist from southern England to present and comment on the perspectives of mill owners and workers in an industrialising city. Initially, Gaskell wanted the novel to be titled after the heroine, Margaret Hale, but Charles Dickens, the editor of Household Words, the magazine in which the novel was serialised, insisted on North and South. The 2004 version renewed interest in the novel and attracted a wider readership. With Wives and Daughters (1865) and Cranford (1853), it is one of her best-known novels and was adapted for television three times (1966, 19). Overall, it was an enjoyable series.North and South is a social novel published in 1854–55 by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. The characters were articulate and the plot was both credible and absorbing. The story was well told with excellent acting, especially from Armitage, Sinead Cusack and Tim Piggott Smith. The BBC is very good at this sort of thing. Gaskell, and the central characters go through some hardships and misunderstandings before they reach the predictable happy ending. She befriends the family of a union leader and causes controversy by speaking her mind about working conditions in the mills. Hale's family don't have a lot of money and seem out of place. The heroine is Margaret Hale (Daniela Denby-Ashe) a clergyman's daughter from Hampshire who finds it difficult to fit into northern society. The hero is John Thornton (Richard Armitage) a self-made mill owner, who initially appears to be an aloof and brutal tyrant (Mr. The story is set mainly in England's industrial North West during the 1850s, a time when even the rich seemed on the verge of destitution. I've probably seen far too many BBC costume dramas, but we were both gripped immediately and watched the whole thing in one sitting - all four hours. I bought the DVD version for my wife she liked the book and enjoyed the BBC version of Wives & Daughters.

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell