North and South, Volume I.

We follow the protagonist, Margaret Hale, in the first episode during the year or so between her eighteenth and nineteenth birthdays. In the very beginning, she is still staying with her wealthy Aunt Shaw in London, where she has spent nine years on and off. Her cousin Edith is about to marry Captain Lennox and go with him to Corfu. His brother Henry tries to woo her, but finds little response from Margaret. This handsome and sometimes perhaps too honest girl is already with her parents in Helston, South England, where her father is a pastor. He trades in a successful and mundane London for the tranquillity of the countryside. But he enjoys it only briefly - Mr Hale succumbs to long and agonising doubts about the strength of his faith and chooses what he believes to be the only decent solution: resigns his position as a clergyman and moves with his wife, Margaret, and the servant Dixon to Milton in northern England. Perhaps because she has been uprooted from the idyllic surroundings of her home, Margaret feels the flip side of the English industrial revolution all the more painfully and at first has no thought of love. Henry Lennox recedes into the background, and the place in Margaret's heart is taken by Milton factory worker John Thornton, intrigued by Margaret's vivacity and beauty...

The novel North and South, which has received countless translations around the world (and two BBC adaptations), is being published in Czech for the first time in a translation by Jana Srbová. The first part will be followed by a second and a third part in the course of 2012. In it, Elizabeth Gaskell proves that she belongs - along with Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters - among those 19th-century English women writers whose work has fascinated generations of readers.