North and South
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.
One critique sums Margaret up as too consistently right and too admired to generate real tension: “Add 1 Mary Sue, otherwise known as Margaret Hale.” The romance stays inert for most of the book, with real tension between the leads not arriving until near the end. Multiple reviewers count several character deaths across the story, several handled off-page, calling the pattern repetitive and melodramatic rather than earned: “Add at least 6 character deaths, almost all off-page.” A critic calls the middle stretch “Half whiny, half polemical lectures – no humour,” a contrast against Austen’s wit that readers measuring the book against Pride and Prejudice keep drawing. The dialect written for the working-class Northern characters is flagged as hard to follow, and the ending is called rushed, a side effect of Gaskell learning late in serialization that she’d have fewer chapters than planned.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
