“Immediately there arose a clamour of tongues, each with some tale of his mother’s gentle doings, till Leonard grew dizzy with the beatings of his glad, proud heart. The town comes together at the end of the novel, along with Ruth’s son, to realize that despite her mistakes, they all deeply cared for Ruth: Ruth begins working as a nurse, and nurses the ill Bellingham to health before she dies. Ruth’s employer finds out the truth and dismisses her before Ruth admits the truth to her son. Donne, finds Ruth and tells her that he will marry her, but Ruth rejects him.

Benson and Faith manage to convince everyone that Ruth is a young widow, and Ruth is able to work as a governess for a number of years while raising her son. Bellingham, under the name of Mr. Thurston Benson, a minister whom Ruth befriended whilst living at the inn, along with his sister, Faith, take Ruth to live with them. Ruth falls ill before discovering she is pregnant. With nowhere to live, Ruth accompanies Bellingham to an inn where the two live for a number of months before Bellingham leaves Ruth.

Mason sees the two alone together she immediately dismisses Ruth. Ruth and Bellingham form a secret friendship, but when Mrs. While repairing a dress at a ball, Ruth meets Henry Bellingham.

However, subsequent readings of the novel have made me think of Ruth’s agency (or lack of agency) in a new way: by making Ruth a passive character, Gaskell allows for her redemption.Īt the beginning of Ruth, Ruth is an orphaned sixteen-year-old working for Mrs. She goes along with the decisions of other characters, and it is often unclear to the reader as to whether or not Ruth is acting because (a) she wants to, (b) because she wants to do what someone else wants her to do, or (c) because she doesn’t know what else to do. Events seem to happen to Ruth rather than happening because Ruth is actively making them happen. Ruth is a passive character for the first half of the novel. This complex portrayal of the “fallen woman” resulted in very different reactions to the novel.Īdmittedly, Ruth was difficult for me to read the first time I read it.

Gaskell’s Ruth is different from other “fallen woman” texts I’ve read, such as Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799), because Ruth redeems her reputation by the conclusion of the novel. I find Ruth particularly interesting because of Gaskell’s complex portrayal of the “fallen woman”-a trope used in nineteenth-century fiction where a young female character loses her innocence and is thus no longer a morally or socially accepted character. Ruth is one of the more well-known texts that Mary Elizabeth, Kailey and I decided to study this summer. Wikimedia Commons.Įlizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth was published in three volumes by Chapman and Hall in 1853. Portrait of Elizabeth Gaskell by George Richmond, 1851.

Ruth gaskell