AUTHOR: Elizabeth Gaskell
PUBLISHED: 1854
CATEGORY: Classic, Adult
GENRE: Romance
PREMISE: A young woman moves to a new town after her father has a crisis of faith.
MY THOUGHTS: The first thing that popped into my mind as I read this was "this is kind of like Pride and Prejudice" and...it honestly is basically a bit of a redux on it. Gaskell definitely does her own take on people falling in love despite differences of opinion on things. Things don't go down quite the same way. I'm not saying it's a rip-off or anything like that. But...you can sort of tell, Gaskell got a lot of inspiration from Austen. As an Austen fan, I don't mind.
This one took the social commentary to higher levels then Austen did. But there was also still plenty of heart tugging romance. I definitely see why a lot of people fell for this story. There's lots going on, a lot of things to think about and the prose are great. Very wordy at times, like most of the classics are (daily reminder: a lot of authors back then were paid by the word. The books are wordy for a reason).
This was actually a rather enjoyable classic. I'll definitely be looking into Gaskell's other books in the future.
WHO SHOULD READ: Romance fans, Jane Austen fans, Bronte fans
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