Very nicely filmed, somehow both visually stylish and accurate on period detail. Based on the novel of the same title by Gaskell, a work that is crucial for understanding in an ideologically deflected way the transition from Romanticism (the country cottage, poetry, equality, etc) to early Victorianism (industrial power, science, Darwinian adaptation, bourgeois reform, etc.) that Gaskell seems to endorse through the transformation of the heroine, and her choice of husband. Myth in action here, as in the sense of resolving this contradiction in imaginative fiction. Alas, the contradictions between Romantic values and Victorian values remains with us even into the 21st century. This perhaps explains why the BBC television production of _North and South_ was so watchable for so many viewers.
Review of North & South
