Book description
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JENNY UGLOW
Milton is a sooty, noisy northern town centred around the cotton
mills that employ most of its inhabitants. Arriving from a rural idyll
in the south, Margaret Hale is initially shocked by the social unrest
and poverty she finds in her new hometown. However, as she begins to
befriend her neighbours, and her stormy relationship with the
mill-owner John Thornton develops, she starts to see Milton in a
different light.
Elizabeth Gaskell was born on 29 September 1810 in London. She was
brought up in Knutsford, Cheshire by her aunt after her mother died when
she was two years old. In 1832 she married William Gaskell, who was a
Unitarian minister like her father. After their marriage they lived in
Manchester with their children. Elizabeth Gaskell published her first
novel,
Mary Barton
, in 1848 to great success. She went on to publish much of her work in
Charles Dickens's magazines,
Household Words
and
All the Year Round
. Along with short stories and a biography of Charlotte Brontë, she
published five more novels including
North and South
(1855) and
Wives and Daughters
(1866).
Wives and Daughters
is unfinished as Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly of heart failure on 12
November 1865.
