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A review by reads2cope
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
5.0
Oh my god I loved this so much. A socialist Pride & Prejudice is right, and since I love P&P so much I can't believe it too me this long to read this! I only watched the BBC North & South miniseries for the first time in 2020, and have re-watched it so much since I almost had it memorized. Normally I try to read the book first, but some of Gaskell's writing was confusing for someone not familiar with the dialects she included in dialogue, so in this case it helped to have a reference.
No slight against the book, but this edition (Duke Classics eBook printed 2012) was awful. I switched to reading a Project Gutenberg and listening on LibriVox (really enjoyed MaryAnn's reading!) because the Duke version was missing punctuation and had many other mistakes (printed "hack" instead of "back," "he" instead of "be," etc.) Definitely will be avoiding checking out any more from Duke and hopefully will find a way to report it to my library so they can get a better copy.
It was also disappointing that a book about inequality contained so many slurs and stereotypes against the Roma and the Irish, and such disgust towards Catholics, but it was enlightening to see what was so socially acceptable to say about minority groups then.
Finally, the ending was so abrupt! Gaskell built up the romance and tension so beautifully, I wanted more, so please forgive me if I finally start logging FanFic reads on here...
No slight against the book, but this edition (Duke Classics eBook printed 2012) was awful. I switched to reading a Project Gutenberg and listening on LibriVox (really enjoyed MaryAnn's reading!) because the Duke version was missing punctuation and had many other mistakes (printed "hack" instead of "back," "he" instead of "be," etc.) Definitely will be avoiding checking out any more from Duke and hopefully will find a way to report it to my library so they can get a better copy.
It was also disappointing that a book about inequality contained so many slurs and stereotypes against the Roma and the Irish, and such disgust towards Catholics, but it was enlightening to see what was so socially acceptable to say about minority groups then.
Finally, the ending was so abrupt! Gaskell built up the romance and tension so beautifully, I wanted more, so please forgive me if I finally start logging FanFic reads on here...