Adapted for television three times, North and South traces the experience of nineteen-year-old Margaret Hale, who is returning to her family’s village after living with her aunt for nearly a decade. Her life is quickly thrown into upheaval as her father leaves his vocation as a pastor in the Church of England, and their family is scorned for dissenting. To escape their new reputation, the Hales move to Milton, a city experiencing the dramatic changes of the Industrial Revolution. Margaret falls in love with the gritty place, gets to know her new neighbors well, including many hard workers and the strict and stern John Thornton, who runs the factory. When tragedy strikes, Margaret is stuck between the workers and the factory managers, and she places herself in the line of fire for both groups in an effort to get them to reach a peaceful agreement.

North and South has remained an example of how the early days of the Industrial Revolution felt to those who lived through them, and Elizabeth Gaskell wrote it from personal experience. This novel explores the tensions of a city overtaken by a system that values profits over people, and it inspired and informed other works from the time period, such as those by Charles Dickens, the editor of the original serialized version of the story.