SOURCE: Johnson, Patricia E. “Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South: A National Bildungsroman.” The Victorian Newsletter 85 (spring 1994): 1-9.

In the following essay, Johnson examines North and South as a Bildungsroman in which the characters Margaret and Thornton achieve maturity by revising their ideologies of class and gender.

The authoress never seems distinctly to have made up her mind as to what she was to do; whether to describe the habits and manners of Yorkshire and its social aspects in the days of King Lud, or to paint character, or to tell a love story.

Thus George Henry Lewes criticizes Charlotte Brontë's industrial novel Shirley in an 1850 Westminster Review. This criticism has echoed for nearly 150 years and has troubled not only readers of the Victorian industrial novel but also literary critics interested in social questions from Marxist and feminist points of view. Ruth Bernard Yeazell reframes Lewes's critique more...