Book Review: Women's Historical Lit. Month

At the Salon meeting we held to decide which books to read this year, Casey and I decided that we wanted to read a book that was fictional, written by a woman, and written more than a century ago - and thus was born Historical Women's Lit month. We settled on a book by Elizabeth Gaskell, (on my part) due to the great success of the BBC "Cranford" series which they showed on PBS. Cranford is pretty short, and one of her other books Wives and Daughters was way too long for the short month of February - so there was North and South, just right in length (if maybe leaning towards the too long side), with a lot of literary value, and an equally good BBC special. I'll admit, I had already seen the BBC version of North and South, and Mr. Thornton is really hot. So I was pretty excited about reading this book. So was it as good as I had hoped? Find out after the cut!




Ok. So while the movie version that I saw stays very true to the book, it was another bird altogether trying to read this thing. For the first 150 pages I had to FORCE myself to sit down and read. The words seemed inordinately tiny on the page and it was a chore to get through a chapter. It was one of those affairs where it's a pretty long book already, but it seems even longer by how long it takes you to read it. In fact, I had to take a break like 60 pages in and read a romance novel in hopes of getting my reading juice regenerated. I mean, what was weird though was that it's not like it was bad or unenjoyable, it was more just bleh.

However, everything turned completely around for me when Margaret moved to Milton and was starting to get settled into her new environment. After page 150 I went into a reading frenzy and read the rest of the book (all the way to page 425) in one day. Maybe it's just that I got used to the narration style, or maybe it's that the book actually got interesting at this point. I think probably a little bit of both.

Mostly what made the book more interesting once Margaret moved to Milton was the introduction of Mr. Thornton, the proud Mill owner. Of COURSE Margaret hates him when she meets him, but Mr. Thornton is totally beguiled by Margaret and thus follows a series of charged debates between the two. Honestly, the interactions that Margaret had with Mr. Thornton were pretty great. So great, and so sparse that I really wish there had been more. But the scarcity of their interactions and how charged they were aided in spurring me on to read more so that I could get to the next time they faced off. I will admit though - reading about their interactions through Margaret's eyes wasn't HALF as interesting as when we saw them through Mr. Thornton's eyes. Mr. Thornton was a much stronger character than Margaret in my opinion. Yeah - Margaret was courageous and had spunk and a virtuous sense of justice - a veritable modern woman, which was great. But Mr. Thornton. A self-made man, with strong ideas of what "manliness" is, and surprisingly sensitive! It was amazing! I honestly felt like, and this is a good thing, that he is one of the models for what romance novel heros are today. It was actually odd to me how much he fulfilled my modern views of what a good leading man should be. To illustrate - here is a screenstill from the BBC movie version that perfectly describes to me how badass Mr. Thornton is.


Heck yes.

But back to Margaret. She was well developed, had all of the right elements there (independence, spunk, courage, confidence) to make her relatable and someone who we want to see succeed, but something just seemed to be missing. I liked her a lot, but I often found myself wondering - "now what is it that Mr. Thornton loves her so much for?" What Margaret really did for me is underline how great Jane Austen is. That seems like a non sequitor, but I swear it isn't totally. All of Jane Asuten's heroines are so relatable and we just fall in love with them. We want to BE them. If Lizzy Bennett and Margaret Hale had a catfight, Lizzy would just straight up rip Margaret a new one. I don't know, I guess we can't expect everyone to be as awesome as Lizzy, but it just seemed like she was trying to be that awesome, but fell just short of it.

Besides just Margaret and Mr. Thornton, there were some really great (and annoying) secondary characters. I loved Nicholas Higgins, her brother Frederick, Sir John, and her Dad (he SO got shafted by being called feminine all the time). And I loved to be annoyed with her cousin Edith and Mr. Thornton's sister. But there were a couple characters who kind of annoyed me when they weren't supposed to - namely Bessy Higgins and her mom. At least I don't THINK we were supposed to be annoyed by her mom. Either way - they were both big complainers, and yeah, sure, they were dying. But do we have to TALK about it all the time? What a Debbie Downer.

Well that basically concludes my review of this book. I'm interested to hear what the rest of you (Casey) think :). And ALL of us - wether you read the book or not (Allison) - need to watch this movie in celebration of our Women's Historical Lit. month.