‘Nay, Ruth, you are not going to have secrets from me, are you?’ Elizabeth Gaskell’s House is delighted to be celebrating a new 10-year anniversary season of events dedicated to the most controversial of all Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels, Ruth. This infamous book was ‘banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit’ when it was published in 1853. A ground-breaking work, it is now recognised as the first mainstream novel to tell the story of a ‘fallen woman’ sympathetically. The
