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North and South
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 18 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Classics
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Summary
Exclusively from Audible
Written at the request of Charles Dickens, North and South is a book about rebellion; it poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Gaskell expertly blends individual feeling with social concern, and her heroine, Margaret Hale, is one of the most original creations of Victorian literature.
When Margaret Hale's father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience she is forced to leave her comfortable home in the tranquil countryside of Hampshire and move with her family to the fictional industrial town of Milton in the north of England. Though at first disgusted by her new surroundings, she witnesses the brutality wrought by the Industrial Revolution and becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of the local mill workers. Sympathetic to the poor she makes friends among them and develops a fervent sense of social justice. She clashes with the mill-owner and self-made man, John Thornton, who is contemptuous of his workers. However, their fierce opposition masks a deeper attraction.
Gaskell based her depiction of Milton on Manchester, where she lived as the wife of a Unitarian minister. She was an accomplished writer, much of her work published in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words including North and South which was originally published as a serial. She was also friends with Charlotte Brontë and after her death, her father, Patrick Brontë, chose Gaskell to write The Life of Charlotte Brontë.
Narrator Biography
Whether she's up on stage, behind the microphone or in front of the camera, Juliet Stevenson never fails to charm her audience...whoever they may be. Acting roles in Truly, Madly Deeply, Emma, Bend It like Beckham and Mona Lisa Smile have cemented her status as one of the great British actresses of our time. Meanwhile, her popular performances of hits such as Apple Tree Yard, the book that was turned into a TV series that people just couldn't stop talking about, have earned her an overwhelming amount of well-deserved praise for her spoken word talents.
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What listeners say about North and South
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Margaret
- 27-12-10
an interesting novel made special by the reading
North and South must be on many people's list of 'books I ought to read but never have' - in book form, its length is rather daunting! Juliet Stevenson's reading, which truly deserves to be described as beautiful, made listening to it a matter of complete enjoyment. There are so many characters to enjoy, scenes to remember, and the well-known depiction of various social classes and contrasts in Victorian Britain, and Juliet Stevenson brings them all out to the full, never missing a single element in her faultless performance. Perhaps credible plot is not Mrs Gaskell's strongest point, but I was surprised at how exciting the story often is. Altogether I have spent several days hooked up to my iPod at every available minute, and this is one of the best audiobooks I have had so far. Strongly recommended.
61 people found this helpful
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- gg
- 15-02-10
Romance and Finance
In many ways this story of boom and bust is relevant now as it was when written.I loved the story of how a girl brought up in the country adapted to the life in the Northern town. She is a strong comple heroine and I found this book really got me thinking about what is fair and not fair in daily working life. If this sounds dreary it's not at all, the love story and the family dramas are compelling and it is an uplifting book well read with a great story.
41 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Joanna
- 07-08-10
North and South (Unabridged)
Never having been top at the class at english lit., I often find that the pleasant but flowery language of many classics distracts me from the plot. More often than not I feel that I 'should' read or listen to a classic but cannot honestly say I really enjoyed it. North and South however is now in my top five books I love. I got a real sense of the time and place, the characters were vivid and interesting but most of all it was a lovely romance. The sex and violence of modern novels replaced with gentle sensuality against a sometimes brutal backdrop of poverty and untimely death. The narrator was perfect and added to the experience and now I'm off to buy the book to read it myself.
31 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Maureen
- 03-02-10
A definite winner!
Dont' be put off by Audible's somewhat dry academic description of this book. Yes, it is "set in the context of Victorian social debate" but it is primarily a wonderful and powerful story, superbly written by Elizabeth Gaskell and excellently read by Juliet Stevenson.
It contrasts southern city life and southern and rural life with the hardship and grime of life in a northern mill town. It paints a vivid picture of the struggle between poverty-striken mill workers and prosperous mill owners. It includes action, tragedy and passion as well as romance and gentleness. Who can forget the many memorable and believable characters who demand your sympathy. A powerful book I could not put down. I highly recommend it to you.
44 people found this helpful
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- Kirstine
- 20-11-17
Superb narration of a multi-layered novel
I’ve read a couple of other books by Mrs Gaskell so had an idea of what to expect and I wasn’t disappointed. Its a very long book that explores the impact of loss of social status on a family, including the plucky central character Margaret Hale, against a backdrop of industrial unrest. Like Dickens, the author highlights the inequalities in society, however, I find her characters more realistic compared with Dicken’s propensity to create caricatures. It’s surprising that at the time Mrs Gaskell was regarded as inferior to Dickens and her books largely forgotten until recently. For me she’s up there with Trollope and Dickens without their tendency to have meek, soppy young heroines.
Juliet Stevenson’s narration is superb and more like a radio drama owing to her ability to create so many different voices.
11 people found this helpful
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- Kitty Kat
- 18-07-10
An epic love adventure
This story has a lovely atmosphere. It's about the contrasts of the landscapes and the contrasts in the people who live, in the North and in the South of England. In Margaret Hale's journey from one end of the country to the other she sees these differences. Then she meets Mr Thornton, a mill owner, and an epic love adventure begins.
11 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Denise
- 31-05-10
Fascinating Reading
I wasn't sure I would enjoy this at first but I absolutely did. The portrayal of life, social culture, relationships, the breaking down of the stereotypes of north and south, are absolutely fascinating. A must read.
10 people found this helpful
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- RJ
- 10-08-11
I love this story even more now
I already liked North and South from a previous reading and the BBC TV adaptation. Now I love it even more, largely due to Juliet Stevenson's fantastically evocative reading. She brings all of the characters alive and gives them their own voices. I have already listened to it three times and I sense it will be pulled out again and again... I have now bought another classic read by Juliet Stevenson as I enjoyed this one so much!
15 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Sairose
- 31-05-11
Wondeful listen
Wonderfully narrated. The interesting prose about life during this age intermingled with the personal lives of the characters kept me coming back to this audio book whenever I could.
Thoroughly enjoyable.
7 people found this helpful
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- Susan Whitehead
- 31-01-16
North and South
Brilliant book beautifully read by Juliet Stevenson who gives life to all the characters. It is an interesting tale of class and industrial history. It never drags but keeps you fascinated until the final tantalising ending,leaving you wanting more and more of Mrs Gaskell.
6 people found this helpful
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Overall

- Sally
- 04-01-10
Delightful
ABOUT THIS AUDIO RECORDING
Juliet Stevenson, where you you been? This is one of the most difficult books for reading I've listened to (several different English accents, northern cockney, southern low and high)--many different voices required, and Stevenson is master of all of them. I think she is the best reader I've ever heard, bar none. Really, the best.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Think of Elizabeth Gaskell as Jane Austen with teeth. This is a thoughtful period piece, describing the social upheaval resulting from the industrial revolution, and Gaskell (herself a lady) makes a great effort see all sides, the workers' and the mill owners'.
You may be browsing for a North and South audiobook because you've lately swooned over the BBC's recent miniseries by that title. (Thank you, Richard Armitage.) If so, you won't be disappointed in the original. It's as good as the movie (a strange compliment for a book, I know).
Margaret Hale is a gentlewoman from the south of England, lately displaced to the northern manufacturing town of Milton (fictional), where she meets the focused and brooding Mr. Thornton, cotton manufacturer extraordinaire. We love Margaret from the outset, and it's such a pleasure to come to understand and love Mr. Thornton.
NOTE: beware the ending
For all the greatness of the story, the ending is wimpy--400 pages of romantic angst, and it resolves in few passionate repititions of "Margaret!Margaret! Margaret!" and a paltry embrace. Those Regency and Victorian writers just don't know how to end a story. I recommend listening to the audiobook until the last 5 minutes. Then turn on the BBC video (also available on Netflix "watch instantly"), and sate yourself in a real ending. (Again, thank you Richard Armitage.)
251 people found this helpful
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Overall

- Susannah McBride
- 09-12-09
Fabulous Book, Made Even Better by the Narrator
I loved this book! It is "Pride and Prejudice" for the Victorian era, and I fell in love with all the characters just as deeply. The advantage over Austen's book is that it has a bit of a social conscience, but I felt it flowed very well with the story. The story telling was lovely, and the discussion of Victorian attitudes to industry were very interesting. The author discusses weighty things without being tedious or overbearing, and I loved that both my brain and my heart were engaged.
The narrator Juliet Stevenson did a magnificent job, especially with the Northern accents. It is sometimes hard for women to read men's voices well, but she made John Thornton much more sexy than I've heard anyone portray Mr. Darcy. I will definitely look for more books read by her, as well as more books by Elizabeth Gaskell, whom I've only just discovered after years of reading "classics." I also enjoyed that every chapter began with a relevant quote from a poem or song. Another of my favorite authors, Mary Stewart, also does that (perhaps Gaskell was her inspiration for this?). It really added a whole extra layer of description and meaning.
81 people found this helpful
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- Diane Walter
- 25-01-17
Gloom, gloom, gloom
I read several reviewers making analogies between this story and those of Jane Austen. I beg to differ. I found the emotions of the characters in this story lacking in the complexity of Austen's. They seemed shallow, histrionic, and unlikable. The story itself dragged on far too long in the beginning chapters and was far too gloomy, and then ended too abruptly at the end. It was like the author spent months or years writing the first part and then dashed off the end because her publisher was threatening to take back her advance. At least five characters died but I felt no shock, no sorrowbecause it was impossible to get emotionally attached to anyone in this tale. I would not consider reading another book by this author. The narrator was phenomenal, but she couldn't rescue a bad tale.
15 people found this helpful
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- David P
- 13-06-17
Gaskell + Stevenson = Literary Dream Team
Another astonishingly great performance by Juliet Stevenson. She does an amazing variety of accents, attitudes, and moods, and brings everything to life with such precision, I felt as if these characters were people I knew. This is one of Gaskell's best novels, both a wonderful love story and a deeply insightful analysis of labor and class divides. It was interesting to listen to this after Gaskell's Mary Barton and note the way her craft and confidence as a writer had developed.
11 people found this helpful
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- David
- 26-03-13
A worthy Victorian classic
An easy test of whether you'll like this book is whether you like Gaskell's contemporaries: George Eliot and Charles Dickens are the most obvious, though the plot borrows a bit of Jane Eyre and a bit of Pride and Prejudice. Gaskell writes closer to Eliot's style, but with a bit of Dickens's social consciousness. In the end, North and South ends up a romance, but the romantic obstacle course navigated by the romantic leads is not the most compelling element.
North and South features as the protagonist 19-year-old Margaret Hale, whose father, upon having a crisis of conscience, quits his job as a country parson in idyllic southern England and moves his wife and daughter north to the industrial cotton-mill town of Milton. To say Margaret and her mother don't like their new home is an understatement — they hate it, and Margaret is certainly not enamored of the wealthy industrialist Mr. Thornton, who, undaunted by either her mannerly disdain or his mother's cold mercenary disapproval, is struck with love at first sight. (I felt this was one of the weakest parts of the book, as it's never explained just what made this prissy southern girl so irresistible to him.) He then spends the rest of the novel being in love with her despite resigning himself to not having a chance with her, and Margaret spends the rest of the novel denying that she feels anything but disdain for him, while constantly worrying about what he thinks of her.
This thread winds it way through much more compelling and illustrative social dramas: workers' strikes and grinding poverty, the bustling but harrowing rise of English industry that made many people rich and many more people soot-covered beggars. Here, Gaskell stays more refined and less comical than Dickens; her poor are not grotesque caricatures, but hard and not always sympathetic people.
Margaret is a well-educated country girl, and her mother is a typical upper-class housewife. The Hales aren't used to these northerners who speak bluntly, tell you exactly what they think of you, ask personal questions, and talk openly about money.
Mostly we see Milton and its northern ways through Margaret's eyes, and Gaskell invokes some of the social issues of the time, as when a poor family Margaret befriends gets caught up in a millworkers' strike. At first, Mr. Thornton seems like your basic hard-hearted capitalist oppressing his workers, but Gaskell slowly draws out more nuanced arguments: Thornton is a hard, proud, mercenary man, but he's upright and honorable and he's earned his fortune the hard way. And the millworkers, while legitimately oppressed, are not exactly angels and they believe some really stupid things. The tone swings back and forth between pro-capitalist parochialism and a more humanitarian saga; Gaskell writes about economics and class warfare more convincingly than most of her peers. She doesn't have Dickens's sharp edge, but she isn't writing social satire.
Honestly, I could have done without the obligatory Jane Eyre-ish happy ending altogether. And Margaret Hale, while she certainly has a voice and a personality, was a little too simpering at times (though not as bad as Fanny Price). I thought the social issues and the secondary characters were more interesting than the Lovestruck Capitalist and the almost-perfect protagonist. This was a fine novel - I'm only dinging it a star because Gaskell's writing didn't quite stand out enough to distinguish it from all the other books I've been comparing it to.
Juliet Stevenson, who does many of these classic British novels, was fantastic in this one. She handled the male characters as adeptly as the females, and her accents were perfect: she spoke with the northern burr of the Milton characters, and the southern country accent of the Hales, making the different parts of England distinct.
45 people found this helpful
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- Melinda
- 10-10-09
Spectacular Narration
The story is a bit like a Jane Austen book, but with more social philosophy which was enlightening. And I have a weak spot for romance these days-- that was in there too, with the steadfast heroine etc. There was also a Christianity motif that would have been unbearable for me (an atheist) to read without being flung out of the story but above all of this, there is Juliet Stevenson who casts it all into perfect balance with astonishing skill. Cannot praise her enough.
44 people found this helpful
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- connie
- 26-11-10
What a difference the narrator makes!
I previously listened to the Charton Griffin narrated version - and he was so wrong for the novel (the train whistles inserted between sections didn't help the listen either).
I gave the novel a second chance because this version was on sale - and am very glad that I did. It's some of Gaskill's better prose, and she did have a good grasp of the problems of industrialization as well as a good narrative in which to frame them.
40 people found this helpful
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- EB
- 01-07-10
Great reading
This is one of my favorite books, and Juliet Stephenson does a great job reading it. She renders the thick northern dialect understandable, and gives character to all the voices. Loved it.
27 people found this helpful
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- 🌸DARA
- 06-06-13
Wonderful!
I think one word says it all "wonderful". I can't add much more to that!!
13 people found this helpful
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- Judith Seaboyer
- 06-04-10
Juliet Stevenson is miraculous!
The wonderful Juliet Stevenson reads this fine Victorian novel with superb skill and intelligence. If you have already read the book, her reading will bring new insights; if not, you are in for a rare treat.
21 people found this helpful