A revolutionary political and social commentary, North and South confirmed Gaskell's place in the company of Victorian England's finest novelists. This Norton Critical Edition is annotated and edited by the preeminent Gaskell scholar, Alan Shelston, and includes the full text of the closely related story "Lizzie Leigh". The criticism section collects eleven assessments of the novel, among them Louis Cazamian's 1904 study of industrial fiction and Hilary Schor's recent analysis of North and South in the context of discourse analysis. A chronology and selected bibliography are also included.