Ruth

…for her next social novel, Ruth (1853). It offered an alternative to the seduced girl’s traditional progress to prostitution and an early grave.

Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis (1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of provincial…

…early example is Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), which portrays a humane alternative to the “fallen woman’s” usual progress to social ostracism and prostitution during the period. If the work is strongly weighted to convert the reader to the author’s stand on a social question, as is the case with Harriet…