Nineteen-year-old Margaret Hale has lived for almost 10 years in London with her cousin Edith and her wealthy Aunt Shaw, but when Edith marries Captain Lennox, Margaret happily returns home to the southern village of Helstone. Margaret has refused an offer of marriage from the captain's brother Henry, an up-and-coming barrister. Her life is turned upside down when her father, the local pastor, leaves the Church of England and the rectory of Helstone as a matter of conscience; his intellectual honesty has made him a dissenter.
Margaret Hale's upbringing in a parsonage and in London hardly prepared her when circumstances forced her to live humbly in a murky, cotton-spinning town. Here she was brought into contact with both masters and men.
Margaret Hale has met John Thornton, the industrialist. They are attracted, but each is antagonistic to " what the other stands for.
The strikers are determined on Thornton's life-and it is Margaret with an implied taunt of cowardice who has sent him to face them.
Margaret has refused Thornton's offer of marriage-and he has seen her at the railway station with her brother, whom he has mistaken for a rival suitor and the reason for her rejection of him.
Margaret is to leave the North and Thornton, and return to London to live with her cousin.
