The Penguin English Library edition of North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell 'How am I to dress up in my finery, and go off and away to smart parties, after the sorrow I have seen today?' Elizabeth Gaskell's compassionate, richly dramatic novel features one of the most original and fully-rounded female characters in Victorian fiction, Margaret Hale. It shows how, forced to move from the country to an industrial northern town, she develops a passionate sense of social justice, and a turbulent relationship with mill-owner John Thornton. North and South depicts a young woman discovering herself, in a nuanced portrayal of what divides people, and what brings them together. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

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Having grown up in London and rural southern England, Margaret Hale moves with her father to the northern industrial city of Milton. She is shocked by the poverty she encounters and dismayed by the unsympathetic attitude of the textile-mill owner John Thornton, whose factory workers are engaged in an acrimonious strike. Against this backdrop of social unrest, the relationship between the two is tumultuous, and it takes further upheaval and tragedy for them to see each other in a different light. First serialized in Dickens's magazine Household Words in the same period as Hard Times, North and South shares its famous counterpart's concern with the inequality and hardship generated by the Industrial Revolution in northern England, while at the same time creating one of the nineteenth century's most memorable and engaging female protagonists in Margaret Hale.

Forced to move from the rural tranquillity of southern England to the turbulent northern mill town of Milton, Margaret Hale takes an instant dislike to the dirt and noise that seems to characterize her new home and its inhabitants - even the handsome and charismatic cotton mill owner, John Thornton. But as she begins to settle in, and to understand the nature of the surrounding poverty and injustice, events conspire to throw her and Thornton together. Amidst the chaos of industrial unrest, they must learn to overcome the prejudices of class and circumstance and admit their feelings for one another. One of literature's greatest romances, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell is both an incisive social commentary and an electric portrayal of all-conquering love. This Macmillan Collector's Library edition of North and South features an afterword by Kathryn White. Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Presents a collection of linked short stories about the inhabitants of the eponymous small provincial town. Interweaving comic episodes with social comment, this title is a celebration of the better side of human nature, in which kindness and generosity of spirit triumph over adversity.

Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel depicts nothing less than the great clashes between capital and labour, which arose from rapid industrialisation and problems of trade in the mid-nineteenth century. But these clashes are dramatized through personal struggles. John Barton has to reconcile his personal conscience with his socialist duty, risking his life and liberty in the process. His daughter Mary is caught between two lovers, from opposing classes - worker and manufacturer. And at the heart of the narrative lies a murder which implicates them all. Mary Barton was published in 1848, at a time of great social ferment in Europe, and it reflects its revolutionary moment through an English lens. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first novel about the world in which she lived - Manchester at the height of the industrial revolution. As the wife of a Unitarian minister she was solidly middle-class; but she also had close contact with the working classes around her, sympathised with them, and represented their extreme distresses in her fiction. She is radical in taking on their dialect, imagining the realities of their lives, and placing a working woman at the centre of her fiction. If to our eyes her vision remains limited, it was an honest vision, for which she was much criticised in her own time, by her own class.

This Norton Critical Edition of her best-selling novel is annotated and edited by preeminent Gaskell scholar Alan Shelston. "Contexts" includes contemporary reviews and correspondence related to North and South, along with the full text of Gaskell s 1850 short story "Lizzie Leigh," which, like North and South, is set in industrial Manchester and deals with strong working women. This topic is further addressed in Bessie Rayner Parkes s essay on Victorian working women. "Criticism" collects eleven assessments of the novel, among them Louis Cazamian s 1904 study of industrial fiction and Hilary Schor s recent study of North and South in the context of discourse analysis. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included."

With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies. 'In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked fearful self, so like me my soul seemed to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude of body it belonged'. Elizabeth Gaskell is better known today for her pioneering social novels such as Mary Barton (1848) but she also wrote some fascinating tales of the supernatural and the macabre, which are collected here in this volume. The real charm of this dark anthology is its variety. Unlike so many writers of this kind of material, Gaskell allows the story to fit the style rather than the other way around and as result there is a charming freshness to each tale. This remarkable author uses different voices, tones and topics to engage her readers and as you turn from one story to the next you cannot be quite sure what to expect.

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Patsy Stoneman, University of Hull. Set in the mid-19th century, and written from the author's first-hand experience, North and South follows the story of the heroine's movement from the tranquil but moribund ways of southern England to the vital but turbulent north. Elizabeth Gaskell's skilful narrative uses an unusual love story to show how personal and public lives were woven together in a newly industrial society. This is a tale of hard-won triumphs - of rational thought over prejudice and of humane care over blind deference to the market. Readers in the twenty-first century will find themselves absorbed as this Victorian novel traces the origins of problems and possibilities which are still challenging a hundred and fifty years later: the complex relationships, public and private, between men and women of different classes.

Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell's last novel, is regarded by many as her masterpiece. Molly Gibson is the daughter of the doctor in the small provincial town of Hollingford. Her widowed father marries a second time to give Molly the woman's presence he feels she lacks, but until the arrival of Cynthia, her dazzling step-sister, Molly finds her situation hard to accept. Intertwined with the story of the Gibsons is that of Squire Hamley and his two sons; as Molly grows up and falls in love she learns to judge people for what they are, not what they seem. Through Molly's observations the hierarchies, social values, and social changes of early nineteenth-century English life are made vivid in a novel that is timeless in its representation of human relationships. This edition, the first to be based in the original Cornhill Magazine serialization of 1864-6, draws on a full collation of the manuscript to present the most accurate text so far available.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

After her parents pass away, young Rosamond is raised by her nurse in the ancestral home of her aunt, Miss Furnivall. One day the two uncover an exceptionally beautiful old portrait? A relative, distant or close? And is that the strange sound of a distant organ, or simply the wind?

With an Introduction and Notes by Dinny Thorold, University of Westminster Gaskell's last novel, widely considered her masterpiece, follows the fortunes of two families in nineteenth century rural England. At its core are family relationships - father, daughter and step-mother, father and sons, father and step-daughter - all tested and strained by the romantic entanglements that ensue. Despite its underlying seriousness, the prevailing tone is one of comedy. Gaskell vividly portrays the world of the late 1820s and the forces of change within it, and her vision is always humane and progressive. The story is full of acute observation and sympathetic character-study: the feudal squire clinging to old values, his naturalist son welcoming the new world of science, the local doctor and his scheming second wife, the two girls brought together by their parent's marriage...

This Norton Critical Edition of Gaskell s first novel is based on the 1854 Fifth Edition, the last edition corrected by the author.

Contexts includes letters related to Mary Barton s publication as well as Gaskell s reaction to her harshest critics. Ten contemporary reviews reflect the dual nature of the novel s critical reception: one group valuing its eye-opening moral energy and concern for the suffering of the working classes and the other group taking Gaskell to task for the deceptive implications of her perceived flawed reasoning. A section featuring fifteen illustrations from the novel offers readers the opportunity to explore narrative emphases.

Criticism collects seventeen major interpretations of the novel s central themes. Contributors include Kathleen Tillotson, Richard D. Altick, John Lucas, Catherine Gallagher, Hilary Schor, Deborah Epstein, Susan Zlotnick, Jonathan H. Grossman, and Liam Corley, among others.

A Chronology of Gaskell s life and work and a Selected Bibliography are also included."

Elizabeth Gaskell's episodic second novel, sometimes dismissed as nostalgically "charming," is now considered by many critics to be her most sophisticated work. The country town of Cranford is home to a group of women, affectionately called "Amazons" by the narrator, whose seemingly uneventful lives are full of conflicts, failures, and unexpected connections. A rich commentary on Victorian culture by one of its most astute observers, Cranford owes its enduring popularity to the complex pleasures it offers the reader.This Broadview Edition provides an assortment of historical materials to put the novel in context, including Gaskell's letters from the period of the novel's writing, excerpts from texts read by the characters, illustrations from the novel and from contemporary periodicals, and other Victorian writings on industrialization, etiquette, and domestic life.

'"The curse - the curse!" I looked up in terror. In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and right behind, another wicked, fearful self' An encounter with the supernatural in an everyday setting accentuates its strangeness; a truth used to eerie effect in Gaskell's Gothic tales. A portrait turned to the wall, a hidden manuscript, a mysterious child that lives on the freezing moors, a doppelganger formed by a woman's bitter curse: all of these things hint at male tyranny and woman as avenging angel - or devil.

Gaskell was fascinated by the dualities in women's lives and the way in which fact and fiction merge. 'Disappearances', a mix of gossip, legend and fact, relates stories of mysterious vanishings, 'Lois the Witch', based on an account of the Salem witch hunts, shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to communal hysteria and persecution, while 'The Grey Woman' explores a common Gothic theme, the way in which the ghosts of the past always return to haunt us.

This edition includes an introduction, chronology, explanatory notes and an appendix giving a reader's response to 'Disappearances'.

With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Emeritus John Chapple, University of Hull. The sheer variety and accomplishment of Elizabeth Gaskell's shorter fiction is amazing. This new volume contains six of her finest stories that have been selected specifically to demonstrate this, and to trace the development of her art. As diverse in setting as in subject matter, these tales move from the gentle comedy of life in a small English country town in Dr Harrison's Confessions, to atmospheric horror in far north-west Wales with The Doom of the Griffiths. The story of Cousin Phillis, her masterly tale of love and loss, is a subtle, complex and perceptive analysis of changes in English national life during an industrial age, while the gripping Lois the Witch recreates the terrors of the Salem witchcraft trials in seventeenth-century New England, as Gaskell shrewdly shows the numerous roots of this furious outbreak of delusion. Whimsically modified fairy tales are set in a French chateau, while an engaging love story poetically evokes peasant life in wine-growing Germany.

'I see her now - cousin Phillis. The westering sun shone full upon her, and made a slanting stream of light into the room within.' Elizabeth Gaskell has long been one of the most popular of Victorian novelists, yet in her lifetime her shorter fictions were equally well loved, and they are among the most accomplished examples of the genre. The novella-length Cousin Phillis is a lyrical depiction of a vanishing way of life and a girl's disappointment in love: deceptively simple, its undercurrent of feeling leaves an indelible impression. The other five stories in this selection were all written during the 1850s for Dickens's periodical Household Words. They range from a quietly original tale of urban poverty and a fallen woman in 'Lizzie Leigh' to an historical tale of a great family in 'Morton Hall'; echoes of the French Revolution, the bleakness of winter in Westmorland, and a tragic secret are brought vividly to life. Heather Glen reflects on the stories' original periodical publication and on the nineteenth-century development of the short story in her Introduction to these immensely readable and sophisticated tales. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

In Ruth Elizabeth Gaskell set out to portray, not 'the Condition of England' already famously addressed in Mary Barton, but the nature and sensibility of a fallen woman.

Her orphaned heroine Ruth, apprenticed to a dressmaker, is seduced and then abandoned by wealthy young Henry Bellingham. Shamed in the eyes of society by her illegitimate son, and yet rejecting the opportunity to marry her seducer, Ruth finds a path that affirms we are not bound to repeat our mistakes.

When Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell's second novel, appeared in 1853 its first reviewers were less scandalised than moved and intrigued. In considering a 'fallen woman', Gaskell explores the worlds of nineteenth-century experience concerned with women and family, sexuality, love and religion. She declared of her critics - 'It has made them talk and think a little on a subject which is so painful it requires all one's bravery not to hide one's head like an ostrich'.

‘How am I to dress up in my finery, and go off and away to smart parties, after the sorrow I have seen today?’

When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the north of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of the local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. This is intensified by her tempestuous relationship with the mill-owner and self-made man, John Thornton, as their fierce opposition over his treatment of his employees masks a deeper attraction. In North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell skillfully fused individual feeling with social concern, and in Margaret Hale created one of the most original heroines of Victorian literature.

In her introduction Patricia Ingham examines geographical, economic and class differences, and male and female roles in North and South. This edition also includes a list for further reading, notes and a glossary.