I wrote the following article about many fans of the "NORTH AND SOUTH" trilogy:



CONFLICTING VIEWS ON THE "NORTH AND SOUTH" TRILOGY

I have been a fan of John Jakes’ "NORTH AND SOUTH" trilogy, ever since I read the first novel - "North and South" when I was in my twenties. After reading both the first and the second novel, "North and South" and "Love and War", I became a fan of the saga, upon which the miniseries are based. Because of my love of Jakes’ saga, I began perusing many websites created by fans of the saga and joined a few Yahoo discussion groups. And what I had discovered about the saga’s fandom has left me feeling not only shocked, but wondering if these fans had any idea what Jakes was trying to convey in his story.

Reading some of the "NORTH AND SOUTH" websites and the Yahoo groups has led me to wonder if the majority of this particular fandom tend to place the saga into the same category as "THE BIRTH OF A NATION" or "GONE WITH THE WIND". In other words, many of these fans tend to view Jakes’ saga with a conservative eye. Either they seemed mistaken...

Look Back – "NORTH AND SOUTH: BOOK II" (1986)

Judging from past articles I have written about the "NORTH AND SOUTH" Trilogy, one would surmise that of the three miniseries that have aired in the past decades (two in the 1980s and one in the 1990s) that I seemed to have the most problem with the second miniseries in the trilogy, namely "BOOK II". And if I have to be honest, one would be right.

It is odd that I would choose the second miniseries as the most problematic of the three. "BOOK II" is set during the years of the Civil War – a historical conflict that has heavily attracted my attention for so many years that I cannot measure how long. "BOOK III", which aired at least eight years after the second miniseries, was set during the early years of Reconstruction and has a reputation amongst the "NORTH AND SOUTH" fans as being inferior to the other two. But for some reason, I have had more of a problem with "BOOK II". So I have decided to examine each of the six episodes of the 1986 miniseries to determine why this chapter in the "NORTH AND SOUTH" trilogy is such a problem for me.

I wrote this article about one of the major characters in the "NORTH AND SOUTH" Trilogy, written by John Jakes and adapted for television by David Wolper:


"REMEMBERING VIRGILIA HAZARD"

My recent viewing of my "NORTH AND SOUTH Trilogy" DVD set, led me to the "Special Feaures" section that featured a behind-the-scene look at the television miniseries trilogy. In it, Patrick Swayze (Orry Main), James Read (George Hazard), Lesley Anne-Down (Madeline Fabray) producer David Wolper and the trilogy's author, John Jakes discussed both the literary and television versions of the saga. I found their recollections of the trilogy's production very interesting and entertaining. But the actors' admissions that they regarded abolitionist Virgilia Hazard to be their favorite character took me by surprise. Even more surprising was my discovery that John Jakes shared similiar feelings.

In the saga, Virgilia Hazard (Kirstie Alley) was the only daughter of iron manufacturer William Hazard (John Anderson) and his wife, Maude (Inga Swenson) in Lehigh Station, Pennsylvania. She had three brothers - the eldest sibling Stanley...