Overview

Set amid the rapidly changing social, spiritual, and moral landscape of the industrial revolution, North and South is a forceful, brilliant, and romantic novel about freedom and the cost of profit. When Margaret Hale, a minister's daughter, relocates with her family to Milton in the north of England she witnesses firsthand the brutal working conditions in Milton's factories and mills. Her liberal education has given her strong convictions, but little common sense, and her pity finds a mostly unsympathetic ear among the gruff mill workers and their families. Magaret is most vexed by a local industrialist and mill-owner, John Thornton, whom she considers contemptuous and bull-headed. But through her clashes with Thornton and her growing affinity for the workers and their plight for survival, Margaret comes to see the world as a much more complicated place, and that her earlier pity was not charity but a kind of arrogance. Thunderously philosophical and compulsively readable, North and South is a vivid portrayal of not only unthinking conformity or selfish individualism, but the power of vulnerability and change.

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9781961884366

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Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865) was born in London but she spent her formative years in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon and the north of England. In 1832 she married Unitarian minister Reverend William Gaskell of Manchester. As well as leading a busy domestic life as minister's wife and mother of four daughters, she worked among the poor, traveled frequently, and wrote. Mary Barton (1848) was her first success. She met Charlotte Bronte in 1850 and wrote the controversial biography of her late friend's life, The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857). Adrienne Garcia-Specht is a writer and Elizabeth Gaskell enthusiast. She earned a master's degree in English from Syracuse University and lives on California's Central Coast. Morgan Spector is an actor and producer who is best known for his leading role as George Russell in The Gilded Age. Allison Miriam Smith is a co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. She is also an Acquiring Editor and Publishing & Publicity Manager for Unnamed Press. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she was an assistant curator for the USC Doheny Library George Cassady Lewis Carroll Special Collection. She later went on to earn a Masters in 18th & 19th c. Literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, working nights at the library. Before Unnamed Press, she was a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, CA. Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Minor Black Figures, The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is an Acquiring Editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. He lives in NYC.

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