North and South - by Elizabeth Gaskell

Many a happy times of my life are those sunday afternoons spent reading victorian era fiction and losing myself in those characters and their times. One such afternoon was yesterday ofcourse I did not read but watched the series based on the novel.

After a hectic and anxious friday and saturday spent doing the upgrade the escape to 1854 England was a blessing. I have never heard of Elizabeth Gaskell until I came across this mini series on netflix. Now I am going to read the book and relive it all over again. These are the simple pleasures of life I look forward to.

Here is a little bit about North&South I found on wikipedia:
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North and South is a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, first published in 1854. It originally appeared as a serial in the magazine Household Words. The title indicates a major theme of the book: the contrast between the way of life in the industrial north of England and the wealthier south, although it was only under pressure from her publishers that Gaskell changed the title from its original, Margaret Hale.

North and South presents, as the title suggests, a contrast between the old agricultural gentry of the south of England and the new industrialists of the north. As the wife of a Unitarian minister in Manchester, Elizabeth Gaskell herself worked among the poor and knew at first hand the misery of the industrial areas.

The book is a social novel that tries to show the industrial North and its conflicts in the mid-19th century as seen by an outsider, a socially sensitive lady from the South. The story: the heroine, Margaret Hale, is the daughter of a Nonconformist minister who moves to the fictional industrial town of Milton after leaving the Church of England. The town is modeled after Manchester, where Gaskell lived as the wife of a Unitarian minister.
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