North and South by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell.

North and South is the second social novel and the fourth overall by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. One of Gaskell's best known novels and produced two television adaptations - one in 1975 and the other at the end of 2004. The latter version, North & South, renewed interest in the novel and gained it a wider audience.

Set in the fictional town of Milton in the North of England when industrialisation was changing the city. Forced to leave her home in the tranquil rural south, Margaret Hale settles with her parents in the industrial town of Milton where she witnesses the harsh brutal world wrought by the industrial revolution and where employers and workers clash in the first organised strikes. Sympathetic to the poor whose courage and tenacity she admires and among whom she makes friends, she clashes with John Thornton, a cotton mill manufacturer who belongs to the nouveaux riches and whose contemptuous attitude to workers Margaret despises.