Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell’s second full-length novel, sets out, like Mary Barton before it, deliberately to challenge its middle-class readership to imaginative sympathy with a conventionally unsympathetic character and situation. Ruth is the first novel in nineteenth-century England to take for its heroine a fallen woman. Based on the real-life events experienced by a young unmarried mother whose cause Gaskell had personally taken up, Ruth tells the story of a girl of respectable parentage, now orphaned and apprenticed to a dressmaker, who is seduced by a young squire, Richard Bellingham. When Bellingham abandons her in the Welsh village where she and her lover have been living, Ruth, pregnant and despairing, is rescued from attempted suicide by a dissenting minister, Mr Benson. He and his sister subsequently take Ruth into their home in the northern English parish...
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Citation: Billington, Josie. "Ruth". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 June 2003; last revised 20 October 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2276, accessed 09 June 2026.]
