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The reading public seems to be divided into those who fall hopelessly in love with Mrs Gaskell’s saintly Ruth and those who find her irritating. I belong to the latter group, an admission which will no doubt lead to some accusations of heartlessness (I’m also with Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell). Ruth Hilton, an orphaned dressmaker’s assistant, is seduced and abandoned by the wealthy Henry Bellingham. Alone and pregnant, a hunchbacked nonconformist minister, Thurstan Benson, takes pity on her and helps her establish a new life as a respectable widow, Mrs Denbigh. In this guise she is able to obtain employment as a governess with the evangelical Bradshaw family. All is well until Bellingham reappears on the scene as the local prospective parliamentary candidate, and then Ruth’s hidden past is brought into the light. Her continuing self-sacrifice leads ultimately to tragic consequences. ...

Sent out to domestic service by her drunken stepfather, Esther Waters is forced to leave a good position after being seduced and abandoned with child by fellow servant, William Latch. Repelled by her family, she struggles with life as a single parent, nursing a rich woman’s baby to the detriment of her own, working eighteen hours a day for a capricious mistress, and even resorting to the workhouse in desperation. Although an occasional character looks upon her kindly, most are out to exploit her weakened state. Her fortunes seem to improve when she finds work with a benevolent novelist and wins the affections of Fred Parsons, a steady and earnest member of the Plymouth Brethren, who believes she has already atoned for her “sin”. Just as she glimpses the prospect of security, William Latch reappears, begging her to come back to him so that he can be a father to his child. Esther must choose between the safe option of Fred and the more exciting, but dangerous, alternative offered by William. ...

Ouida (1839-1908) was born Maria Louisa Ramé in the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds to an English mother and a largely absent French father. An eccentric child, she rapidly outgrew East Anglia, let alone her birthplace. She was delighted when in 1857 her mother agreed to move with her to the heaving metropolis of London. The good people of Ravenscourt Park (a suburb to the west) were rather perplexed by this strange creature: “she had not, so to speak, grown into her nose, her straight, mouse-coloured hair hung in rats’ tails down her back, and she walked with one small, delicate hand resting on [her dog’s] collar.” Oblivious to her neighbours’ discomfort, Ouida (a childhood nickname) quickly built a career as a successful writer. There was no starving in a garret for her – she immediately struck literary gold with her work for Bentley’s Miscellany and soon became a firm favourite with the reading public. ...

Ouida’s Moths is credited with being the first English novel to show a divorced woman happily remarried, and as such represents a landmark in women’s writing. Of course many authors, notably of the ‘sensation school’, tackled the thorny issue of divorce, but ultimately either the heroine’s inconvenient spouse would obligingly die at the eleventh hour, or she would have to live a nun-like existence, hidden from society’s disapproving gaze. ...

Felicia Skene’s blue plaque at 34 St Michael’s Street, Oxford Felicia Skene (1821-99) was a philanthropist and writer. Born in Aix-en-Provence, she moved to Oxford during the tumult of Newman’s defection to Rome and was heavily influenced by High Anglicanism. Much of her writing was barely diluted Tractarian propaganda, but in Hidden Depths (1866) she exposes the prostitution rife in Oxford (thinly disguised as ‘Greyburgh’), and attacks the hypocrisy of those who blamed the ‘fallen’ women for the spread of venereal disease, rather than the men (and sometimes women) who exploited them. ...

Workers in the Dawn (1880) was the first published novel from the pen of George Gissing, one of the nineteenth century’s most original writers. It tells the story of Arthur Golding, a young boy who finds himself orphaned after his dissolute father dies in the squalor of a London slum. Through a series of fortunate encounters, he gains a good education and embarks upon a career as an artist, meeting the woman of his dreams, Helen Norman, along the way. As this is Gissing, however, it all goes horribly wrong when he rescues an alcoholic prostitute from the streets and tries to reform her, an episode that is largely autobiographical. ...

I’m so glad to have come across Jenny Hartley’s book, as it has greatly improved relations between Charles Dickens and me. We previously had a complicated relationship, as I was unable to forgive him for the appalling way in which he cast aside his wife, Catherine, and consequently, I found his hypocrisy rather repellant. Hartley seems to share my discomfort, but has addressed her subject with commendable skill and balance – her portrait of the soi-disant Inimitable is sympathetic without being sycophantic. ...

The Belton Estate (1865) is the story of a young woman, Clara Amedroz, who vacillates between two suitors: her bucolic but passionate cousin Will, who is heir to her father’s entailed farm, and Captain Aylmer, an urbane but unemotional MP who is tied to his rebarbative mother’s apron strings. The narrative reflects the Jane Austen novels read by Trollope during the 1860s, and they inform his portrayal of an impecunious unmarried woman. With no income of her own and an ailing father, marriage is Clara’s only means of survival, and she struggles with her impending dependence on the men who surround her. She dramatically articulates her frustration: “I think it would be well if all single women were strangled by the time they are thirty.” The sub-plot, involving Captain and Mrs Askerton, deals with society’s intolerance towards others marital misfortunes (an echo of Dr Wortle’s School) and it also serves to highlight both Clara’s humanity and the superficiality of one of her suitors. ...

There can’t be many conditions more protean and elusive in nature than hysteria. Andrew Scull’s Hysteria: The Biography is, therefore, a considerable achievement. It is at once concise, detailed, eminently readable, and also peppered with pleasing literary allusions. The story begins with hysteria’s uterine origins, and the ancient Greeks’ curious belief that it was caused by “the womb wandering around in search of moisture”. Yes, quite. Although it’s easy to be dismissive of such musings, not much progress was made in intervening centuries, and hysteria simply became an easy diagnosis for anyone who was behaving a bit oddly, and it often obfuscated underlying conditions such as tertiary syphilis, multiple sclerosis, tumours, and epilepsy. Hysteria was also big business, with a profusion of quacks touting their patented remedies. Sufferers of hysteria, and especially their families, desperately wanted to believe that is was a somatic, rather than mental, illness, and were willing to pay large sums of money for supposed treatments. ...

As with many Victorian writers, George Gissing’s life (1857-1903) reads rather like one of his novels. In some spooky cases, his life actually imitated his art, the fates suffered by some of his characters later befalling the author. Born in Wakefield in 1857, George Gissing’s existence was one of eternal struggle. Although a gifted scholar, the early death of his pharmacist father left Gissing perennially short of money. His extraordinary talent won him a prestigious scholarship to Owen College (now the University of Manchester) and it looked as though his troubles were over, with a distinguished academic career virtually guaranteed. However, his weakness for a prostitute called Nell was to be his undoing. Initially her client, they soon became lovers, but she still demanded increasing sums of money from him to fund her alcohol addiction. With very limited means, he was forced to steal on her behalf and was eventually caught when the suspicious college authorities laid a trap for him. He was expelled in disgrace and his family wanted nothing more to do with their black sheep. ...