North and South is part-industrial novel, part-Bildungsroman, part-love story. The opening chapters, which have often puzzled readers (Charlotte Brontë among them) as a result of their leisurely indirectness and apparently unfocused fluidity of interest and location, are in fact a prime example of Gaskell’s typical method in this novel which proceeds by gradual, piece-by-piece accretion of myriad, often conflictual centres of activity, value and being. We first meet the novel’s heroine, Margaret Hale, a “stately girl of eighteen” (18), in the drawing-room of the Harley Street home where she has lived since childhood as the companion of her cousin, Edith. Margaret’s status as relative outsider amid this world of wealth and ease is established in part by the contrast, quietly enforced at the level of physique, between herself and Edith. The latter’s fey insubstantiality (she...
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Citation: Billington, Josie. "North and South". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 July 2001; last revised 16 October 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3238, accessed 09 June 2026.]
