North and South

A stone meant for John Thornton catches Margaret Hale instead, and she goes down bleeding in his mill yard, in front of the strikers who came to stone him and the master she has just shielded with her own body. She arrived in Milton a clergyman's daughter from a Hampshire parsonage, certain that a town of smoke and shouting, of masters and hands, had nothing to teach her. Elizabeth Gaskell will not let that certainty survive. Bessy Higgins coughs cotton fluff out of lungs the mill has already ruined, and dies of it before the story ends, and Margaret learns what trade costs a body before she learns to stop despising it. The novel's rarest trick comes at the close: when Margaret finally has something to offer Thornton, it is not her hand but her fortune, the money that keeps Marlborough Mills standing when the market would have let it fall. Two Englands, raised to despise each other, find their way to love only after they learn to owe one another something.