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Ruth Hilton, an orphan who works long, exhausting hours as a dressmaker’s apprentice, becomes besotted by a wealthy young man, Henry Bellingham, after he saves a child from drowning. Ruth is little more than a child herself, but Bellingham takes advantage of her innocence and then heartlessly abandons her, pregnant and more alone than ever. This dramatic and powerful novel about the plight of a ‘fallen woman’ fearlessly challenged Victorian taboos about unmarried motherhood and illegitimacy and confirmed its author as one of the most outspoken writers of her age.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson; 29 September 1810 – 12 November 1865), often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her work is of interest to social historians as well as readers of literature. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Brontë. In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë’s life; the rest she omitted, deciding certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden. Among Gaskell’s best-known novels are Cranford (1851–53), North and South (1854–55), and Wives and Daughters (1865), all having been adapted for television by the BBC.