The Zen Leaf

When Margaret Hale’s father decides to leave the Church of England (he’s a preacher), the family is uprooted and moved to the industrial north, where Margaret gets involved in industrial-era politics. This book is both a romance and a political work about industrialism and class differences.

I’m really sorry to all those people out there who wanted me to read this one, but I really, really didn’t like it. I’d forgotten the things I didn’t like about my attempts to read Gaskell before, and went into this one thinking it would be different. It wasn’t. The experience was painful enough that after about a quarter of the way through, I started skimming, and after the halfway mark, I read the full synopsis on Wikipedia before super-skimming the rest. I can hardly say I’ve “read” this book, but I really wanted to make it through to the end. I wanted to finish something by Gaskell.

My issues were two-fold. First, there was the writing, which felt very clunky to me. It was all telling and no showing, and then it swung on a pendulum back and forth between gossip and politics. Every change in swing felt jarring, as if this were two different books sewn together. The second has to do with one of my pet peeves from nineteenth century literature, and something I noted when I first attempted to read Gaskell, in a Librivox audio recording of Ruth. Many writers, Gaskell included, treated women as if they were glass and would suffer from the slightest bit of damage. It didn’t take much to bring on faintness or deathly illness. All women had to do was cry, walk outside in the dew, get a very mild injury, have an emotional shock, breathe bad air, or have any part of their body touched by rain. Any one of those things, and others, is enough to nearly kill a woman in the nineteenth century, if you are to believe many writers. Of course, you have writers like Charlotte Bronte, who makes her heroine laugh at these notions and spend tons of time walking in both dew and rain without getting sick. Maybe that’s why I love Jane Eyre so much – the only time she gets deathly ill is after being exposed to the elements with no food for days on end, which I think would make anyone sick!

North and South definitely suffered from the melodramatic-woman syndrome. Margaret nearly dies because a pebble grazes her temple, and once they worry she’s going to be on her deathbed because she cries for a couple hours. I just have a hard time with that kind of silliness and melodrama, which (as I said above) I also discussed in my abandoned review of Ruth. At the time I thought perhaps it was the obnoxious Librivox narrator, who read the book as if reading to a kindergarten class, that made the book seem silly, rather than the events themselves, but that was far too hopeful and naive on my part.

As for the romance, I was hoping it would be the one element to redeem the book for me, but I quickly found out I didn’t enjoy it either. I disliked the chosen man (I highly preferred the man from the beginning), and at the same time, I felt like the romance was a major Pride & Prejudice rip-off anyway.

That’s it. That’s all I got out of this book. I really wanted to like it and really wish I had. It makes me very sad to react the way I did. I’m determined to give Gaskell one more chance, though, with Cranford. I’ve heard it’s very different from this one, which would be a good thing for me, and I’m also going to try listening to a professional audio recording of it, hoping that will help. It will be my third attempt at Gaskell, if you don’t count the one short story I read, and if it doesn’t work for me, then I’m just going to have to give up on her. I will give her a fair chance, but I can’t feel bad if three books in a row don’t work for me.