North and South.

I always keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack-in-a-box, for when it jumps into existence it surprises me by its size.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is a somewhat forgotten (at least in the U.S.) classic of 19th century Brit Lit which I discovered by way of the Bloomsbury 100. It’s a sort of Pride and Prejudice meets Germinal, combining a romance between two people who can’t admit their feelings for each other with a commentary on Britain’s “social problem” during its Industrial Revolution in the early to mid-1800s.

North and South‘s heroine is Margaret Hale, who opens the book by rejecting a marriage proposal from Henry Lennox, the old-fashioned and paternalistic lawyer whose brother has just married Margaret’s cousin, Edith. Margaret’s father then announces that he has become a Dissenter and is leaving his post as minister in the southern hamlet of Helstone, instead moving the family north to the industrial town of Milton (a thinly-disguised version of Manchester) where he’ll become a tutor to a local industrialist named Mr. Thornton. Thornton and Margaret take an instant dislike to each other, sparring over the rights and responsibilities of labor and management in a mirror of the contemporary debates over workers’ rights in England at the time. And, of course, they fall in love.

What works about the novel is that while the romance is the foundation of the story, it spends most of the book in the background as Gaskell uses Margaret and Thornton as launching points for subplots around the labor-management strife in Milton. Margaret’s chance encounter with Bessy Higgins, who is terminally ill from working in a textile mill during her childhood, and her father creates a direct window into the life of workers in England’s factories during the 1800s. Gaskell relies a little heavily on coincidence to make sure that the lives of Margaret, Thornton, the Higginses, Margaret’s godfather Mr. Bell, and even Henry Lennox all intersect, although this was very common even in the best literature of the period, and it’s a justifiable maneuver to ensure that both the social commentary and the romance come to a conclusion in the book’s 500-ish pages.

What worked less for me was the romance itself, which felt a little too derivative of Pride and Prejudice and finds a resolution that is driven in large part by money, rather than by emotions or the development of the main characters. In Austen’s masterpiece, Elizabeth Bennet comes around as she learns more of Mr. Darcy’s character and has to admit to herself that she did him an injustice in their earlier meetings. Here, Gaskell imbues Margaret Hale with similar strength of spirit, but denies her the chance for a completely self-sufficient redemption.

Next up: I like big books and I cannot lie – John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, a parody of the picaresque novel, in all its 750 pages of glory.