Celebrating female Victorian writers

Elizabeth Gaskell, Victorian era author. Photo: Public domain

The thing that struck me first as I read Elizabeth Gaskell’s North And South was how different it was from works by her contemporaries, female Victorian writers such as George Eliot, the Bronte sisters and, to go back slightly further, Jane Austen.

This was my first Gaskell novel, and the story of a woman’s journey as she experiences the schisms that exist between the peaceful, largely upper-class south of England and the unstable, newly-industrialised north isn’t at all what I expected when I first decided I would read this particular title. The emphasis on social issues and the female protagonist being used as the lens through which we come to understand them is brilliant.