Ruth Hilton is an orphaned sixteen-year-old sewing gowns in an old county town when the wealthy Henry Bellingham seduces and abandons her in Wales. The Dissenting minister Thurstan Benson and his sister Faith take her in, pass her off as a widow and help her raise her son, but the deception has a price.
Gaskell’s courageous 1853 novel about the ‘fallen woman’, burned by some of its first readers. Download the free EPUB.