A newish friend of mine was going in for knee surgery a few weeks ago, to be followed by a period of still convalescence. She was preparing by assembling a stack of bedside books and a playlist of videos to stream, and so we were discussing her choices. They were all titles that I would have chosen for myself, but something was missing, so I piped up: what about North and South? I braced myself for the typical reaction whenever I mention this series, which is the 1980s miniseries about the Civil War with Patrick Swayze? YOU like that, Donna? But my friend smiled broadly and said she loved that series too and proceeded to talk about THE North and South, the 2004 BBC series based on Elizabeth Gaskill’s popular novel. And then we were off: she was pleased that she had someone to talk about this amazing four-part series, as was I. While North and South has an enthusiastic following in the the UK even 20 years after its broadcast, I rarely run into someone who has even seen it here in the US. We ran through our favorite scenes and our mutual admiration for leading actor Richard Armitrage joyfully. North and South is THE best period miniseries, even better than than that universal favorite, the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice (Colin Firth emerging from the lake!) in my humble opinion.

Actually, North and South is often compared to Pride and Prejudice in terms of their storylines and characters: both are romances between two people from different places and backgrounds who form first impressions which serve as an obstacle to their seemingly-inevitable union. But North and South is set decades later in Great Britain, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution and the early days of unionization, so its leading characters Margaret Hale (Daniela Denby-Ashe) and John Thornton (Armitrage) are much more engaged in the world around them than Elizabeth and Darcy. Margaret is a displaced young woman who is always reaching out: she has spent her entire life in the beautiful village of Helstone in the south of England, the only child of the local vicar and his more retiring wife. Her father loses his comfortable position because of his spiritual differences with the Church of England (he seems to have become a Unitarian) and so the entire family is forced to move north to the stark and colorless industrial city of Milton, a stand-in for Gaskill’s Manchester. They have the perfect Tudor vicarage in the South, and are reduced to a somewhat shabby townhouse in the North, with the Revolution right outside their door. There is no escape.

Everything in the South is filtered sunlight, golden green and fuzzy; everything in the North is gray yet still vivid. But, Margaret is not one to pout: she walks around her new city in her flat brown frisbee hat every day. That hat, it’s like the symbol of the series! (actually there are several–brown, black, and another of some indeterminate drab color)  She meets new people, and Milton seems to aquire more color the longer she is there (that’s another thing—the cinematography in North and South is amazing; it doesn’t look dated at all; whereas Pride and Prejudice definitely wears its age). Margaret’s mother (played by the great Lesley Manville) is “delicate” and miserable; her father (Tim Piggott-Smith) is quite naive, so their daughter has to step up and be practical in securing them a home and this is how she encounters both a cotton factory and its owner, John Thornton, at the same time. Her first view (and ours) of Thornton is not positive: he is beating one of his workers who is smoking amidst all that cotton, which is literally floating around in the air. I can’t imagine anything more dangerous than smoking in a Victorian cotton mill so I immediately excused him, but Margaret does not. There are other factors that keep them apart throughout the four episodes: her class and his awareness of it, her ignorance of “northern” manners, her increasing interest and intervention in the working conditions of the mill workers after she befriends the Higgins family (Brendan Coyle of Downton Abbey and Anna Maxwell-Martin of Death at Pemberley) and his role as the BOSS. But all will give way, eventually.

There are a lot of losses: Margaret loses both of her parents and her good friend Bessy Higgins; John loses the mill. In between all these setbacks, the plot becomes more focused on their relationship but we’re still very aware that they live in a world of dynamic change. A scene at the Great Exhibition of 1851 is a good reminder of this change, but I also took it as as a bit of foreshadowing for national, regional, and personal unity. It takes a while to gauge Margaret’s feelings because she’s not sure of her feelings, but increasingly, John wears his heart on his sleeve: he proposes, is rebuffed, is convinced that his lack of gentility is the reason, yet still pines for her. Armitrage is just a cauldron: you can feel his energy, agitation, desire and disappointment. Even his walk is magnetic. To my American ear, he’s got the perfect Northern British accent, and his fiercely-proud mother (played by Sinéad Cusack) an even better one. When Margaret returns to the South, he stares at her departing carriage and wills her to look back, and then goes South himself, to her former home in Helstone where he snips a flower and puts it in his pocket (Zuzu’s petals!) He is not looking for her, he believes it is over but wants to wallow in his feelings in a very forthright way for a bit longer. Eventually Margaret finds her way North again (after rebuffing yet another marriage proposal and inheriting a fortune from her father’s friend), while John is on his southern indulgence tour. Their trains meet at the same stop, and we are treated to a glorious, very romantic, ending in the perfect Victorian setting: a train platform. It’s so perfect.

Off with her hat and northward!

I envy all first-time watchers!