Wikipedia tells me that Charles Dickens, who originally published this in serial form, found it enormously wordy. Which is true, but it is also the pot calling the kettle black. Apparently he disliked in Gaskell's work what was so predominant in his own. Unlike Dickens, I did enjoy this, wordy as it is. Honestly, it could have been cut down by a third.

It's not many romances that highlight labour relations, however. Set in a cotton mill - presumably contemporary with Gaskell's life - the focus is on the relationship between mill owners and workers, with strikes having a central role. There's a genuine bleakness in the life of many of the workers, with starvation and suicide present, which makes them highly sympathetic. It also makes Margaret, the protagonist, more sympathetic, as she's on their side - and honestly, she's initially such a snob that she really needed to be sympathetic to get any sympathy from me. Gaskell, it's clear, tries very hard to give equal weight to the competing concerns of capital and labour, but she's only able to do so because the mill owner, Thornton (who is unsurprisingly also the love interest) is himself softened by his experiences to become a decent boss... by the standards of the time, anyway. It's equally clear, however, that the other mill owners are awful, and so reconciliation within the system is only really possible on an individual level. Which is a far less hopeful ending for labour in general than it is for the romance. It's worth reading, however, for Higgins alone, who, representing the workers, is the most interesting character of the lot.