Ruth

A small boy in a Welsh village hits a sixteen-year-old girl full in the face, because at breakfast his mother told him what she is. The girl is Ruth Hilton, an orphaned dressmaker's apprentice taken up by a gentleman who is about to leave her pregnant in a strange country, and Victorian fiction knew exactly what to do with her: a warning, or a saint. Elizabeth Gaskell refuses both. She hands Ruth to a Dissenting minister who tells one enormous lie, an invented husband and a borrowed surname, and then lets her live an ordinary, useful, unremarkable life inside it for years, so that when the lie breaks it is respectability in the dock, not the girl. Two men Gaskell knew burned their copies, and she would not let her own daughters read it. She had made the fallen woman neither monster nor martyr, only young. Late in the book she walks into the fever wards nobody else will enter, and sings psalms low and sweet all night to people out of their minds.