while Thornton is proud, reticent and powerful like Darcy. According to Nils Clausson in "Romancing Manchester: Class, Gender, and the Conflicting Genres of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South", the "same romance plot - a rich, proud man subdued by a strong-willed, independent and intelligent woman - reappears half a century later [than Pride and Prejudice] in North and South" (3). Clausson asserts that Austen created the prototypical romance which Gaskell "transposed to mid-Victorian Manchester" (3). Combining romance with the conflicting realism of the social problem novel, Gaskell updates and complicates the earlier plot, a point explored at length by Matthew Sussman in "Austen, Gaskell, and the Politics of Domestic Fiction." In The Politics of Stories in Victorian Fiction (1988), Rosemarie Bodenheimer writes that she prefers to study the novel's relationship with Charlotte Brontë's Shirley but sees in the "description of strong domestic qualities" and "social optimism" an industrial Pride and Prejudice. Patricia Ingham also compares North and South to Shirley. Ann Banfield compares North and South to Mansfield Park for two reasons: Margaret Hale, like Fanny Price, is transplanted in a place she conquers, and the novel is built on an opposition of places on a larger scale. False starts The novel has three beginnings, two of them illusory: the first is the wedding preparation in London, the second the heroine's return to Helstone and the third (often considered the real start of the story) narrates the departure for Milton in chapter seven. The first chapters, according to Martin Dodsworth, are false leads of what the novel is about rather than the author's clumsiness; they tell the reader what the story is not about. Bodenheimer interprets the early chapters not as false starts but as demonstrating Gaskell's theme of societal and personal "permanent state(s) of change" and integral to the novel. The early chapters in different places have been interpreted as presenting a theme of mobility. In moving from one place to another Margaret better understands herself and the world, advancing Gaskell's intention to place her in the public sphere. The opening chapters of North and South indicate an apparent novel of manners in the style of Jane Austen, with preparations for the marriage in London of a silly bride and a lively, intelligent heroine; in the country village of Helstone (a fictional place in the English county of Hampshire), a bachelor in search of fortune (Henry Lennox) woos –