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erainbowd 's review for:
North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Did I like this book? No, no. I did not. It made me want to hurl it across the kitchen many times. It's infuriating in many ways. There's a kind of virtuousness in all the characters that becomes incredibly irritating after a while. Everyone is just so annoyingly moral, even when they're not. But I had some patience for it - thinking about how women in this era were meant to be the beacons of virtue. A Victorian woman could likely not have gotten away with writing a single immoral character. And she does not. Which is boring as hell but I forgive her. It is sort of interesting watching a woman try and operate within those kinds of strictures.
The other thing that drove me bananas was how demonized striking was for the people who lived in this mill town. The book is intensely sympathetic to the owners and suggests that a strike is a terrible terrible sin. I was constantly wanting to shout at the book, "Sometimes a strike is necessary! The workers deserve not to starve to death when the bosses can have fancy parties and throw expensive weddings and what not!"
I also hated the romance. It was obvious and annoying and inevitable. Yes, of course these boring moral people are going to get together. Snooze-ville.
But. I will say that reading the introduction of this novel, after I read it, sort of turned me around a little bit. I came to understand that the author had previously written a book that was sympathetic to workers and been called a class traitor so she was clearly reeling with some class confusion in this one. I came to understand a bit more about the context of the times, of mills and what people were talking about around them politically. As a woman she wasn't supposed to talk about this sort of thing, but she did anyway. And for that I'm glad I read this book. I feel like the best place to read it would be in a history class. It's not that satisfying as a novel but as an historical document, it is very interesting.
The other thing that drove me bananas was how demonized striking was for the people who lived in this mill town. The book is intensely sympathetic to the owners and suggests that a strike is a terrible terrible sin. I was constantly wanting to shout at the book, "Sometimes a strike is necessary! The workers deserve not to starve to death when the bosses can have fancy parties and throw expensive weddings and what not!"
I also hated the romance. It was obvious and annoying and inevitable. Yes, of course these boring moral people are going to get together. Snooze-ville.
But. I will say that reading the introduction of this novel, after I read it, sort of turned me around a little bit. I came to understand that the author had previously written a book that was sympathetic to workers and been called a class traitor so she was clearly reeling with some class confusion in this one. I came to understand a bit more about the context of the times, of mills and what people were talking about around them politically. As a woman she wasn't supposed to talk about this sort of thing, but she did anyway. And for that I'm glad I read this book. I feel like the best place to read it would be in a history class. It's not that satisfying as a novel but as an historical document, it is very interesting.