Jane Austen in 'North & South': A Source Study

When first reading or watching Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, audiences immediately draw connections to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as both main plot lines follow a couple hindered in the development of their relationship by pride, prejudice, and bad first impressions, accompanied by a contemptuous refusal, a gradual self-awareness, and a suspenseful reunion. Accordingly, North and South has aptly been called an industrial Pride and Prejudice. However, as various critics have found through deeper studies, the correlations between Jane Austen and North and South far exceed this basic plot.

Superficially, North and South and Gaskell’s other works’ titles seem to more closely reflect Austen’s titles than those of her contemporary authors (Dickens, Bronte, Trollope, etc.). More in depth, North and South employs both Austen’s use of place names to describe the central setting, such as Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, and her frequent use of two contradictory or otherwise comparative terms that are significantly prevalent to the plot. As in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, the heated debates in North and South focus on the couple’s opinions on the two attributes given in the work’s title.

Ann Banfield draws on the title’s locality when she compares North and South to Mansfield Park. “Margaret, like Fanny, confronts a new place as an outsider. North and South, like Mansfield Park, has a place name as a title, and the novel is built on the same contrasts of place, now seen on a larger scale. With the Austen heroine’s weak father, Margaret finds she is on her own in Milton. Like Fanny, she discovers in returning home that she sees it from a different—an outsider’s—perspective and she cannot stay. But the place of the utopian future is reversed; it is the enlarged and industrialized city. The chapter ‘Looking South’ is a ‘Looking Backwards’; the contrast it seems between industrial North and rural aristocratic South is one between present and an irrecoverable past” (45). In some ways, the latter contemplation of Banfield’s unknowingly reflects Sense and Sensibility. The Dashwoods find themselves leaving their prosperous life to live in a cottage which could be compared to Margaret’s new, unwelcoming home in the North. However much the Dashwoods miss and long for their old life and home, they eventually come to grow into their new home. Their past becomes irrecoverable beyond the physical just as Margaret’s own past becomes irrecoverable even though she does temporarily return to Hampshire and London.

Banfield also says that North and South “opens as an Austen novel, in her South, first fashionable London and then pastoral Hampshire. There the heroine, Margaret Hale, like Austen the daughter of a village clergyman, receives a proposal of marriage from an Austen hero, Henry Lennox” (45-46). Other character and situational connections, as blog writer “Janeite Deb” points out, are the common silliness between Fanny Thornton and Lydia Bennet, Mrs. Thornton’s and Lady Catherine’s chastising reproofs of the falsely accused heroines, and Thornton’s and Darcy’s actions to protect Margaret and Lizzie from scandal and shame.

Gaskell never admitted to any influence from Jane Austen and her works, but the similarities cannot be ignored and due to the instant popularity of Austen’s works upon their publication, it’s unlikely that Gaskell was unfamiliar with them. Therefore, Austen ought to be considered as a source for North and South, as least a source of inspiration.