Description: 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".

Please Wait