
She witnesses the brutal world wreaked by the Industrial Revolution, seeing employers and workers clashing in the first strikes. Forced to leave her home in the tranquil, rural south, Margaret Hale settles with her parents in Milton. The novel is set in the fictional industrial town of Milton in the north of England. Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton (1848), focused on relations between employers and workers in Manchester from the perspective of the working poor North and South uses a protagonist from southern England to present and comment on the perspectives of mill owners and workers in an industrialising city.

North and South is a social novel published in 1854 by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell.
