Author:Elizabeth Gaskell,Angus Easson,Angus Easson

Ruth Hilton is an orphaned young seamstress who catches the eye of a gentleman, Henry Bellingham, who is captivated by her simplicity and beauty. When she loses her job and home, he offers her comfort and shelter, only to cruelly desert her soon after. Nearly dead with grief and shame, Ruth is offered the chance of a new life among people who give her love and respect, even though they are at first unaware of her secret - an illegitimate child. When Henry enters her life again, however, Ruth must make the impossible choice between social acceptance and personal pride. In writing Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell daringly confronted prevailing views about sin and illegitimacy with her compassionate and honest portrait of a 'fallen woman'.
A powerful study of lust, degradation and fantasy
—— ObserverIt says something about the loneliness, about the craving for love, about the relation between master and slave and between white and black, and about man's earthly anguish and longing for salvation - in a way you do not easily escape from once it has gripped you
—— Andre BrinkThe writing and mood are a remarkable piece of sustained intensity... One false word could have ruined this short tour de force completely. It never does
—— Daily TelegraphAn intellectual lyric which sings the absence of history, the electric lull before history breaks... As a piece of cultural psychoanalysis and diagnosis, it's glitteringly precise
—— Tom PaulinA truly terrifying horror story with some interestingly radical underpinnings
—— I-DMr Greens' extraordinary power of plot-making, of suspense and of narration...moves continuously both in time and space and in emotion
—— The TimesHis style is spare, that's what is so beautiful. His novels are genuine romans philosophies - novels illustrating ideas
—— Piers Paul ReadIn a class by himself...the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety
—— William Golding