BINGO: without much futzing I think “border” is very apt for this book, which considers the cultural divide between the North and South of England. With that comes a second (well, third) bingo line
hot take it’s like pride and prejudice except pulled forward a bunch of years and we get a lot more of what’s going on in Darcy’s head (no shade meant to Ms. Gaskell for the cliche comparison)
A very, very long overdue recommendation from Vatsala, who recommended the TV series (“dreamy”) a thousand years ago (update: on August 13, 2019, aka the before times–before COVID, before my life earthquake, before I left NYC). I kept meaning to watch it, because it seemed like the sort of thing I’d love: enemies to lovers/sunshine & grump + historical + English accents + soft focus + not many episodes (!!!!!!!). And then I didn’t, for whatever reason we never finish our TBRs and our to-watch lists. And then, equally mysteriously, I decided I wanted to watch the show and binged all of it in short order. And then, bereft that it was only four episodes, decided to read the book to get some more time in North and South land.
First things first: while this book is the above things, it is also a meditation on the rise of industry as a counterweight to farming-and-aristocracy as an economic mode of being, with substantive subplots on things like strikes, worker’s rights, working conditions, cultural similarities between newly designated regions, cultural dissimilarities between the same, classism, faith and loss thereof, conscientious objections, and a whole lot of other things that you’d probably not guess given the swoony sounding theme music of the BBC production. In fact, when I mentioned I was reading this novel to a British friend, he noted that it was one of the books he’d read for his GCSEs–which isn’t to say Pride and Prejudice isn’t also read for such purposes (I used it extensively in my AP English Lit exam) but merely underscoring that this is a book with Heft.
I’ll say that the TV series is a mite easier to deal with than the book, namely because the latter uses ‘accent speak’–that mildly annoying but understandable thing that authors do where they write out the accent of characters to ensure that you don’t mentally paint everyone with the same (RP) brush. Every time Nicholas (the union rep) or his daughter Bessy shows up, my brain began to grumble in protest.
Main thing that differentiates Austen from Gaskell, however, is that the former feels like a seamless integration of social commentary and marriage plot. The latter feels like a series of radial-ish pamphlets strung together with an interpersonal plot, almost like the author knows you won’t care about the plight of orphaned children forced to work at a factory without some smooching as well.
Which…not unfair.