North and South
Elizabeth Gaskell · 1855
The industrial-era Pride and Prejudice. Margaret Hale and John Thornton's antagonism gradually transforms into love against the backdrop of class conflict and northern England's mills. Gaskell brings the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution into the romance novel, and the result is a love story with a conscience.
The case against
Serialization under Dickens forced the pace, and Gaskell said so: the ending arrives in a rush after four hundred leisurely pages, deaths stack up past plausibility, and Margaret's moral perfection wears on you. Thornton's mill politics get resolved by a convenient inheritance, which is gentler arithmetic than the strike deserved.
Romance · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
