This is an 1855 novel about teenager Margaret Hale, who is forced to leave her beloved parsonage when her father rebels against his church. He moves his family north to the fictional county of Darkshire (seriously? LOL!) in the industrial town of Milton, where she is miserable. My next novel will be set in Lightshire in the village of Tilmon and the teenager will be ecstatic! There is actually no reason given (or if there was, I missed it) as to why they move so far. He plans on taking up work as a tutor, but it seems there would be a much better opportunity in the south than in the north for such work.
Anyway, there she meets John Thornton, who owns Marlborough Mills. This is one of those uninventive novels where the main female character takes an immediate dislike to the main male one, and in the end of course, marries him. It's essentially a Pride and Prejudice for the Industrial age with an ending cribbed from Jane Eyre. I came to this through the television mini-series that I saw a while back. There have been several, but the one I watched and considered pretty decent was the 2004 the BBC aired North and South, and so I figured I'd try the novel, but no joy was to be had. There were parts where the quaint way of expressing themselves back then was highly amusing, but that did not make up for the humdrum story - or rather, lack of one.
Set against a background of dire factory conditions and union organizers, the novel could have been a good one, but it was so tedious to listen to. This was an audiobook read decently by Harriet Seed, who was let down by the material and on occasion by her peculiar pronunciation proclivities with some words, such as 'trousseau'. The story was so rambling and pedantic that it took forever to get moving and never really did - not in the quarter of it that I could bear to listen to, anyhow.
I grew rapidly tired of the endlessly meandering perambulations and trivial topics, and just gave up on it. I was going to at least ride out the week listening to this, but by Thursday morning I'd had enough. Perhaps there's a story in there somewhere, but I saw none of it in the first 25% of this novel, and grew bored with waiting for it to show. Can't commend.
