A revolutionary social and political commentary, North and South solidified Gaskells place in the company of Victorian Englands finest novelists. This Norton Critical Edition of her best-selling novel is annotated and edited by preeminent Gaskell scholar Alan Shelston. Contexts includes contemporary reviews and correspondence related to North and South, along with the full text of Gaskells 1850 short story Lizzie Leigh, which, like North and South, is set in industrial Manchester and deals with strong working women. This topic is further addressed in Bessie Rayner Parkess essay on Victorian working women.Criticism collects eleven assessments of the novel, among them Louis Cazamians 1904 study of industrial fiction and Hilary Schors recent study of North and South in the context of discourse analysis.A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included