Ruth

A fallen woman sympathetically portrayed would seem a less-than-ideal choice as the central focus of a Victorian novel. Yet despite her own misgivings and fears of public censure, Elizabeth Gaskell created just such a portrait in Ruth (1853), the book that followed her highly successful debut novel, Mary Barton. Overturning the conventional assumption that a woman once seduced is condemned to exclusion from respectable society, Gaskell draws a heroine whose emotional honesty, innate morality, and the love she shares with her illegitimate son are sufficient for redemption. Ruth is at heart a romance, and Gaskell employs the conventions of the genre to limn the nineteenth-century world of women and family -- a world in which love, religion, and the devotion of friends provide a haven from the cruelty of Victorian morality's hypocritical "double standard".

About the Author

Elizabeth Gaskell was born in London in 1810 but spent most of her life in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon. She married the Reverend William Gaskell and had four daughters by him. She worked among the poor, travelled frequently and wrote for Dickens' magazine Household Words. Mrs Gaskell was friends with Charlotte Bronte, and consquently went on to write her biography.