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In need of a swoon

June 17th, 2008 Lisa - Central

This winter’s Public Television Jane Austen series inspired me to revisit the classics.  Since I felt a urgent need for more swooning, I picked up North and South, one of Elizabeth Gaskell’s very popular novels.  Mrs. Gaskell was a contemporary and friend of Charlotte Bronte.  I was convinced I was certain to swoon.  But alas, this wasn’t really that type of novel.

Our heroine, Margaret Hale, grows up with her Aunt Shaw and her cousin Edith, in comfortable style in London.   When Edith marries Captain Lennox, and leaves for her honeymoon in Corfu, Margaret returns to her parents, in Helstone, in the southern countryside.  She loves it there, with its pastoral beauty and its gentrified people.  But then her pastor father suddenly decides to leave; he has had a crisis of conscience and can no longer serve the church.  He finds a situation in Milton, in the north of England, where he will teach the classics to a businessman.  Milton is a dirty, busy industrial town of cotton mills and manufacturing plants, and crude and dirty working class people.  Horrors.

Not knowing what to expect from Milton, Margaret soon meets some of the locals and learns of their difficult lives as well as their humanity.  She befriends Bessie and her father Nicholas - she’s dying from exposure to cotton dust; he’s the head of the local union.  Margaret also learns from her father’s student, Mr. Thornton, a mill owner and successful businessman, of the management side of the industrial revolution.  She becomes very involved with the politics of Milton to the point of getting mixed up in a mob of striking workers going for Mr. Thornton, and through her actions, saves the day.

Mr. Thornton, rough and crass and from the business world though he is, falls in love with Margaret, and proposes to her.  She rebuffs him immediately; he is not gentlemanly enough.  But when he later catches her in a lie (there’s a subplot about her brother Frederick, a sailor who mutinied and who will be killed if he returns to England) Margaret is chagrined to be in his bad graces.  Do we detect a swoon alert?  Many pages and subplots later, the story is resolved in that quick, final page Victorian fashion, which leaves you happy but wishing for a bit more of a resolution.  Okay, semi-swoony.

Apparently, the novel closely parallels Gaskell’s life.  She was born in London, raised in the south and moved to Manchester during the Industrial Revolution.  This book was first published as a series by Dickens, of all people, in his journal Household Words.  Gaskell was very interested in the changes in society brought by the Industrial Revolution, and in most of her works explores the social issues that arose with the industrialization and urbanization of British society.

I really enjoyed this book, though it was a tad preachy in the parts where we learn what’s going on with the 2 sides of the industrial story.  Yet, I’m still yearning for a swoon.  I guess I’ll go watch Colin Firth again….

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction