Margaret Hale

Margaret Hale is a vicar's daughter, raised in the gentle south of England, whose comfortable world ends when her father's crisis of conscience uproots the family to the smoke and noise of the industrial north. She arrives in Milton bewildered and a little superior, quick to judge the mill owners' harshness and certain of her own moral footing.

Denby-Ashe plays her with a stiffness that's clearly armour, not coldness — you watch her certainties get chipped at, scene by scene, by a place and a man she's decided to despise. The writing lets her be wrong loudly and often, which makes her slow, stubborn honesty, when it finally arrives, feel earned rather than convenient.