Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell - Book 2

I choose to read Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell because I thought it was the one novel by her I hadn't read yet.  In the classics challenge I am doing this year, one of the categories was a book with a one word title.  But the minute I started reading it, I realized I had already read Ruth.  It's another novel, Sylvia's Lovers by Gaskell that I haven't read yet.

However, Ruth is a really good novel so it was a great reread.   I was still thinking about misogyny when I dove into this book.  Ruth is seduced by a man when she is barely 16 and then abandoned by him.  A dissenting minister with a crooked back and his sister take her in.  She's pregnant and has a child.  How does this household deal with the problem of her 'sin' while trying to raise the child up in a way that protects him from his origin? 

What I liked about this novel is that all the characters are deftly crafted.  Everyone is a sinner, from the mildest like Miss Benson to the greatest like Mr. Bellingham, the seducer, or Mr. Bradshaw, the quintessential Victorian patriarch.   They are all real, sympathetic people.

This is a Victorian novel and Gaskell was a good friend of Charlotte Bronte's and even wrote the first biography of her.  But Gaskell never gets as over the top or as supernatural as the Brontes tend to in terms of melodrama.  Gaskell writes really deeply Christian works that I think get Christianity much better than the Brontes.  The Brontes were in revolt against their domineering, feared (but also loved) father's version of Christianity.  But Gaskell has a far deeper grasp, so her novels are more about how Christian virtue sees one through the hardest times and makes them meaningful and gives beauty to suffering. 

The book also reminded me of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen because it is also about a powerless, outcast woman who has an accurate interior compass when it comes to steering herself towards what is right.  What do you do if you don't have any power and if people keep misinterpreting what you do and condemning you for it?  Good people of poor judgment who are less in tune with what is truly right and wrong keep pushing you into situations that cause greater sin.  The answer in both books is to cultivate a great, long suffering strength in one's relationship with Christ.  If that is the center then everything else will eventually work out. 

So I am glad I reread Ruth.  I highly recommend it!  Now on to Sylvia's Lovers!

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