Ruth - Elizabeth Gaskell
Category: Historical Fiction
Tags: Historical Fiction
A fallen woman sympathetically portrayed would seem a less-than-ideal choice for a Victorian heroine. Yet novelist Elizabeth Gaskell courageously created just such a portrait in her 1853 novel RUTH. Overturning conventional double standard assumptions of the day, Gaskell draws a heroine whose emotional honesty, innate morality, and love for her illegitimate son are sufficient for redemption. 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
