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.