Ruth
by Elizabeth Gaskell 1810–1865
The book, and the century it came out of.
A fifteen-year-old dressmaker’s apprentice is seduced and abandoned, and a dissenting minister and his sister take her in and pass her off as a widow — a lie that must eventually be paid for by someone. Gaskell, a Manchester minister’s wife, published this in 1853; readers burned it, two men in her husband’s congregation forbade their wives to read it, and she wrote that she felt like St Sebastian. It is the first English novel to treat a fallen woman as a person.
Drop, drop, slow tears! And bathe those beauteous feet, Which brought from heaven The news and Prince of peace.
Ruth, by Elizabeth Gaskell, complete and unabridged. Spelling and punctuation follow present-day American usage; the sentences, the paragraphs and the voice are the author’s, word for word.
It was written in another era and may carry attitudes a reader today will find dated. They are kept for the sake of the work and do not reflect the views of this house.
- Series
- Literary Classics
- Format
- Ebook
- Extent
- about 480 pages
- Reading time
- about 10 hours
- Illustrations
- Full-page plates, credited
- Text
- Complete, unabridged
- Language
- en
- This edition
- 2026
- ISBN
- 9785501366091
60 paintings are bound into this edition
Six of them are shown here, taken from the volume itself. Each is reproduced full page and named with its painter and year.
1853 — a clergyman’s wife writes about an unmarried mother
Gaskell was married to a Unitarian minister in Manchester and knew what she was doing: she gave the novel a seduced girl, a child born out of wedlock, and a community that has to decide what to do about her. Copies were burned. Two members of her husband’s congregation cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine that serialised it.
The law and the workhouse offered such a woman almost nothing, and respectable fiction offered her only death. Gaskell’s intervention was to make the reader spend three hundred pages liking her first.
A page from this edition
Not a mock-up: this page is taken from the finished volume. The ornament above the chapter belongs to its shelf and to no other, the opening letter is set as a drop capital, and the plate below carries the name of the painter and the year.
Both photographed from the finished volume.
Ruth, issued in this edition by Aeneas Press in 2026 on the Literary Classics shelf. Newly set, with the ornament of its series above each chapter and a drop capital on the opening page. Illustrated with full-page plates, each named with its painter.
Published as an ebook and not issued in print by this house; it carries one ISBN, 9785501366091, and is supplied worldwide. This edition — its setting, its ornament, its cover art, and the selection and attribution of its plates — © 2026 Aeneas Press.
Questions readers ask
- Is this the whole of Ruth?
- Yes — complete and unabridged. Nothing is cut, condensed or paraphrased. This is the book, not a summary of it.
- What exactly did you change?
- The spelling and the punctuation follow present-day American usage. Elizabeth Gaskell's sentences are untouched — same words, same order, same rhythm.
- Are the pictures really in the book?
- Yes. The edition carries full-page plates bound into the text, each one named with its painter and the year it was made. Six of them are shown on this page.
- How long is it?
- About 480 pages, which is roughly about 10 hours of reading.
- What do I actually get?
- An illustrated ebook with its own ISBN, sold worldwide. One file, yours to keep, readable on any device.
