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| North and South (Oxford World's Classics) | 
| Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
Creator: Sally Shuttleworth
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $10.95
Buy New: $10.75
You Save: $0.20 (2%)
New (4) from $10.75
Avg. Customer Rating:  36 reviews
Sales Rank: 198498
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 496
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 1.4
ISBN: 0192831941
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.8
EAN: 9780192831941
ASIN: 0192831941
Publication Date: November 19, 1998
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Good Condition, delivery time 10 to 12 Working days, via Priority airmail from UK
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 36 | | ... 8 NEXT » |
 Will read it again and again! March 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
After having seen the BBC's version of North & South, I couldn't wait to read the book. I wasn't disappointed at all! Although well over 400 pages, the book moved along at a good pace. The characters were all very well developed and very interesting. The best part was that Mrs. Gaskell writes from multiple perspectives rather than from just one POV. It was refreshing to find out just what Mr. Thornton WAS thinking! :-) The charcacters were not so numerous to be confusing, and each one was intersting and well thought out. This book has become another favorite and will be read again and again!
An excelent book to any person November 12, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
You have to get familiar with the characters and then you slowly star to love them all.
At the beggining I felt sorry to poor Mr Lennox,he was a Miss Hale's friend but he took her love for granted and he was rejected by her.
Miss Hale is a nineteen years old girl who has always lived in a confortable way with her parents but some day Mr Hale finds that his faith has change and he can not continue in the church with such doubts and they decided to move to the north of England.
Mrs Hale gets sick because the air and the rhythm or life in such a place is very hard to face however the family find a house where to live and a new way to start all over. They meet Mr John Thornton a mill's owner who wants to become a more educated person learning some literature now that Mr Hale has become a tutor in his new hometown.
The prejudices Miss Hale shows for him at the beggining and the tough way of Mr Thornton made them fell uneasy every time they meet however this are the very things that make them get closer and realize that north and south can not be so different after all and that the things one place lacks can be fulfill by the other place.
It is a masterpiece.I was so glad I bought this incredible good book.
I red it and just want to read it again.
 A Botch. Not as Good as the Splendid 2004 BBC Miniseries. May 29, 2007
13 out of 19 found this review helpful
The best thing about Elizabeth Gaskell's "North and South" may be that it inspired the superlative 2004 BBC miniseries by the same name. In fact, the miniseries was so good the day I finished watching it I began reading Gaskell's novel.
Given its failings, it is miraculous that director Brian Percival, writer Sandy Welch, Martin Phipps, who wrote the score, and the entire excellent cast were able to create such a stunning miniseries out of this less than stellar novel.
"North and South" has its appeal. If you are interested in class relations in Manchester, England during the Industrial Revolution, and the transition from an agrarian culture to a mercantile one, you have to read this book. And, if you are one of us who was stung by the "North and South" bug thanks to the BBC miniseries, nothing will stop you from reading this novel.
But if you are craving a richly worded, expansively populated, nineteenth century novel, by all means read Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, and their fellow English-language writers in America -- Twain, Alcott -- before you read Gaskell's "North and South."
It's a botch. Gaskell's talent shines through, but her need for a good editor is evident on every page. There are obvious errors, such as her giving one character two separate names. Pages and pages of footnotes and explanatory notes are meant to pick up where Gaskell fell short.
Characterizations of the main characters, Margaret and Thornton, are unforgivably weak. Margaret never became a fully fledged character. Oddly, minor characters -- Mr. Bell and Dixon, a maid -- are much stronger.
The central relationship, between Margaret and John Thornton, is underfed to the point of anorexia. Who are these two people? Why do they care about each other? Do they care about each other? They don't come across as fully rounded human beings at all, but as didactic cut-outs Gaskell has trumped up to sell an idea -- and a fine idea it is -- of class and lifestyle reconciliation during a time of traumatic shifts in English traditional life.
Transitions are handled amazingly poorly. Climactic confrontations thud -- or, worse, tinkle -- on the page. Tension is mentioned between two characters, and suddenly you realize that they are in the same room, and, and, and ... nothing happens.
Gaskell constantly -- on almost each page -- makes references to other literature, high and low, familiar and obscure, and much too much of it simply middlebrow. Again, the reader is left to leaf through pages of explanatory notes to penetrate these allusions.
These allusions suggest literary laziness on Gaskell's part. Rather than animating a unique, living, breathing, human being in whom the reader can invest, Gaskell tells us that a given character is like the Biblical Vashti or like Cleopatra.
All these allusions to other literature, and use of allusions to do the work of creating characters or atmosphere that Gaskell's writing is not doing, prevent the reader from ever experiencing the most elemental of literary pleasures -- entering another world. Rather than entering another world when reading Gaskell's "North and South," one enters an annotated Anthology of World Literature. The book tastes of leftovers.
One of the most poignant moments in the BBC miniseries occurs when Mr. Thornton, watching Margaret depart from him, wishes that she would turn her head and look at him one last time. This moment pulses, it feels thrillingly inhabited and spontaneously alive. All distance of time, class, dialect, between the viewer and the 19th century gentleman in the high collar melts. You're certain you've felt the same thing when watching a loved one depart, even if you never have.
In the novel, this scene is crafted with all the subtlety of a putty knife. It's stiff, and it's dead. Here's a quote, from page 399: "...she kept rigidly to her resolution but in the respect and high regard which she had hoped would have ever made him willing, in the spirit of Gerald Griffin's beautiful lines, 'To turn and look back when thou hearest the sound of my name.'"
Be honest, now; don't tell me that that is good writing.
Again, the book has its charms. The BBC miniseries made me fall in love with these characters, and I had to read the book just as a way to avoid letting go of them.
But I wish Mrs. Gaskell had had a better editor, to eliminate the chaff in this book, and burnish the worthy passages that are here to shine as brightly as the good intentions behind their creation warranted.
"brutalised both as to his pleasures and his pains" March 10, 2007
16 out of 18 found this review helpful
North and South is a very ambitious novel, and the fact that it has flaws in the execution do not detract from its successes.
It is, first of all, a social novel. It explores the differences between the industrialized north of England and the older more agricultural life in the south. The characters are all gripped by the hand of change-- changing religious beliefs, changing relationships between master and servant, changing expectations of family life and changing socio-economic conditions. What Gaskell does very well in North and South is forefront these critical themes. Since the novel is also a love story, it would have been easy to use the social aspects of the novel as nothing but pretty backdrop. Instead, Gaskell places it front and center-- to the point where occasionally the relationship between Margaret and John feels like nearly an afterthought. I like the emphasis-- it saves the novel from being a Pride & Prejudice retread. It may, however, account for some of the oddities of pacing noted by other reviewers.
As a reader, I really love the small moments in the novel. There is a wonderful scene when Margaret realizes that her habit of visiting the worthy poor is much less acceptable in the industrial north. She recoils when her offer to visit a sick neighbor girl is seen as condescending and possibly unwanted. That small moment captures volumes both about the character of Margaret and about the world in which she lives.
This is the third book by Elizabeth Gaskell that I have read. I believe that it is the best of the three (the others being Mary Barton and Cranford). Considering how much I enjoyed the other two novels, this is very high praise. I would recommend North and South to anyone interested in the social novels of the Victorian period, historical fiction with a focus on labour issues, or works that critiqued the role of women in Victorian society.
It is a moving, entertaining and thought-provoking book.
Surprisingly modern tale of class conflict, management theory, and of course, love February 6, 2007
19 out of 21 found this review helpful
I read the book, like many other reviewers here, after I had watched the brilliant BBC miniseries starring Richard Armitage and Daniela Denby-Ashe. I definitely agree with the comments of many reviewers here that you somehow seem to develop a finer appreciation of the nuances of both after doing that.
A lot of reviewers have covered the ground admirably on the story itself, so I won't go into too much detail on that. In addition to the fine development of plot and characters alike, what I found refreshing about the novel were:
a. Unlike a few other writers of her time, Elizabeth Gaskell focuses a lot more on the thought processes and feelings of the male characters in the novel. For example, you don't get to hear a lot of what Darcy or Edward Ferrars are thinking in Pride and Prejudice, or Sense and Sensibility, except almost tangentially. In sharp contrast, Mrs. Gaskell gives quite a detailed peep into what John Thornton and Richard Hale are thinking, throughout the novel. As someone who is always interested in the differences in thought processes between the sexes, I found this to be refreshingly different from other novels of the time.
b. Being in business, it was quite a new experience to read about John Thornton's evolution first as a business owner and then as a "leader", to use that overused term of today. Mrs. Gaskell appears to have a remarkably sophisticated understanding of both management and labor issues. The examples that stand out in my mind - John Thornton's increasing interest in exploring a better construct for labor-management relations beyond the mere "cash nexus" (towards the end of the novel), and his practice of building what we would call a business case today, as he asks Nicholas Higgins to put some figures together for the new cafeteria.
c. A valuable peep into the mores of the time - for example, despite being fond of Bessy Higgins, Margaret recoils in horror at the thought of visiting her after Bessy's death, a point glossed over in the BBC mini-series, - it gives you a rare insight into things like death and burial customs of the time,.
I must agree with a few other reviewers that the last few chapters seem a little rushed, but from an overall perspective, it is hard to beat this novel for its pure wholesome enjoyment value - more serious and deep than a Pride and Prejudice, and still light enough for people like me who cannot take Thomas Hardy. A definite five stars!
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