Elizabeth GaskellNorth and South
1855
A tremendous
masterpiece in its scope, a shock-book that could see the issues of its time_
and ours_ before they were acknowledged; that could find a strong interest in
people that were rarely talked about; that wasn’t afraid of telling us about
the rights and wrongs of our most beloved movements.
North and South follows the route from a dualistic conception of life to the apogee of this meeting between dualisms: two people, two ways of life...and their alternatives. This is not a book with one ready-made solution; there is no ideal, there are only truths under that one honest desire to understand the other. North and South teaches you how to learn how to love.
The writing is superb, as if complex thoughts and situations were flowing from the author’s vision to her hand without effort, as if she was merely revealing a situation that was really there, lifting in a few fluid sentences the curtain of your own mind and that of your neighbour.
This is the poetry of the mind that thinks hard and is never afraid of going too far.
North and South follows the route from a dualistic conception of life to the apogee of this meeting between dualisms: two people, two ways of life...and their alternatives. This is not a book with one ready-made solution; there is no ideal, there are only truths under that one honest desire to understand the other. North and South teaches you how to learn how to love.
The writing is superb, as if complex thoughts and situations were flowing from the author’s vision to her hand without effort, as if she was merely revealing a situation that was really there, lifting in a few fluid sentences the curtain of your own mind and that of your neighbour.
This is the poetry of the mind that thinks hard and is never afraid of going too far.
Tags: historical relevance, industrial revolutions, capitalism & industrialisation, unions & syndicats, social observation, class confrontation, socio-political structure & agenda, famille & land, feminism, faith vs. religion, ladies & gents' courtship dance, 19th-century society, roman de mœurs, close quarters, religious doubts and questions
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