ABSTRACT
There is something intensely appealing about Elizabeth Gaskell for a twenty-first-century audience. Unlike Jane Austen's intra-social conflicts or the Brontë sisters’ gothic interior struggles, Gaskell's characters develop through socioeconomic and geographic prejudice to arrive at an understanding of the world at large, and their place in it. North and South (1854–1855), perhaps the most traditionally romantic of her novels—with its quiet and strong-willed woman and its Byronic, quietly passionate man divided not only by situation, family, prejudice, and miscommunication but also by geographical misunderstandings themselves—offers the traditional happy ending that her other novels such as Ruth (1853) and even Mary Barton (1848) do not. Margaret Hale sacrifices little of herself, and John Thornton is a better person because of her. The couple seem to “get” each other in a way that comments on their success as a couple, and ultimately, the success of uniting North with South. They—and here, I am purposely ambiguous—have gone through trial and tribulation to arrive not only at happiness, but also at contentment and understanding. Happy endings, it seems, are what make North and South so popular.
