From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen
While Mary Barton is literally a murder mystery, it is also an abundantly detailed and sympathetic view of the nineteenth-century English weaving village of Manchester and some of its people. Mary Barton is young, kind, and beautiful - perhaps dangerously so. John Barton, her hearty and intelligent but grievously uneducated father who "could never abide the gentlefolk," pours fierce love and courage into his family and work. When Mary's beautiful Aunt Esther disappears, her beauty is blamed: "Not but what beauty is a sad snare. Here was Esther so puffed up, that there was no holding her in." Mary's love - for her father, her friends, her charming rich suitor (the son of a factory owner), and his rival, her faithful childhood friend Jem who "loves her above life itself" - provides rich texture and suspense in this finely spun tale: will Mary's pride be her ruin? Will Jem pay with his life for his love of Mary? Interspersed with sparse but regular authorial observation, scenes from family life, work, and love in a nineteenth-century industrial village come alive. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Mary Barton first appeared in 1848, and has since become one of the best known novels on the 'condition of England', part of a nineteenth-century British trend to understand the enormous cultural, economic and social changes wrought by industrialization. Gaskell's work had great importance to the labour and reform movements, and it influenced writers such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and Charlotte Bronte. The plot of Mary Barton concerns the poverty and desperation of England's industrial workers. Fundamentally, however, it revolves around Mary's personal conflicts. She is already divided between an affection for an industrialist's son, Henry Carson, and for a man of her own class, Jem Wilson. But Mary's conflict escalates when her father, a committed trade unionist, is asked to assassinate Henry, who is the son of his unjust employer."--BOOK JACKET.

SYNOPSIS