<Tr> <Th> Publisher </Th> <Td> Chapman & Hall </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Th> Media type </Th> <Td> Print </Td> </Tr> <P> North and South is a social novel by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell . With Wives and Daughters (1865) and Cranford (1853), it is one of her best - known novels and was adapted for television twice (1975 and 2004). The later version renewed interest in the novel and attracted a wider readership . </P> <P> Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton (1848), focused on relations between employers and workers in Manchester from the perspective of the working poor; North and South uses a protagonist from southern England to present and comment on the perspectives of mill owners and workers in an industrialising city . The novel is set in the fictional industrial town of Milton in the north of England . Forced to leave her home in the tranquil, rural south, Margaret Hale settles with her parents in Milton . She witnesses the brutal world wrought by the Industrial Revolution, seeing employers and workers clashing in the first strikes . Sympathetic to the poor (whose courage and tenacity she admires and among whom she makes friends), she clashes with John Thornton: a nouveau riche cotton - mill owner who is contemptuous of his workers . The novel traces her growing understanding of the complexity of labour relations and their impact on well - meaning mill owners and her conflicted relationship with John Thornton . Gaskell based her depiction of Milton on Manchester, where she lived as the wife of a Unitarian minister . </P>

Is north and south based on a book