Even more so than usual, this Labor Day weekend seemed like the end of summer to me. Actually, not just the end, but the finale. It actually felt like graduate school, but without the pressure. I would finish one book on this era with the realization that I had to read two or three or four more. I had questions which led to more questions. For an early modern European historian, this kind of synchronicity seldom happens!
Lafeyette arrived in Salem around pm, there were formal welcomes and speeches and a few photo ops, and then he was on his way. While some of the exhibits clearly belonged to another time, others clearly have resonance in our own, like the banner that boldly states LIBERTY. 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 s miniseries about the Civil War with Patrick Swayze? YOU like that, Donna? 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. 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.
