Since I loved the PBS series "Cranford," I wanted more. The series are supposed to be based on a couple of Gaskell's books, so I bought Cranford and this one. There was nothing of the TV series that came from "North and South." The book was pretty slow going at first, but since I loved Cranford, I stuck with it. I'm not sure that to enjoy the ending you really needed all of the little details. There is a family prominent to the story that added nothing and wasted a lot of pages, in my opinion. But I guess they are there to illustrate both sides of the economic life. It's not a book I would read again. But the ending made up for all the slogging through I had to do to get there. Now that I've read what I wrote, I'd have to say that it really wasn't worth all the time I spent reading it.