My New Book!
Hello and welcome to my new blog on my brand-new website! I have a lot to say, because my latest novel Elizabeth and Ruth, is coming out on 9 February next year (2026) with the wonderful Salt Publishing!
Elizabeth and Ruth is about a Victorian writer, Elizabeth Gaskell. Elizabeth Gaskell is probably most famous today for Cranford, which was serialised beautifully by the BBC a few years ago, but also for Mary Barton and North and South – both political novels about the relationships between factory workers and factory owners. She also wrote a biography of her great friend Charlotte Bronte after Charlotte’s death.
And she lived in Manchester and wrote about it, almost before anyone else did!
Her second novel, Ruth, has been described as the first English novel to feature an unmarried mother as heroine. In Victorian terms, Ruth was a ‘fallen woman’, and the novel was banned and burned by some people after publication, because Gaskell’s portrayal of this young girl was so sympathetic.
The story of Ruth is said to have been based on a young Irish prostitute, known to us only as Pasley. Elizabeth visited Pasley in Manchester’s New Bailey prison and in order to help her, wrote to another great Victorian writer – Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens was at that time involved in a Refuge for ‘fallen women’ in London, where young women would be taken in off the streets and trained for work, then sent abroad. The advice he gave Elizabeth changed the course of Pasley’s life.
Elizabeth and Ruth is based on the correspondence between these two great writers. It took me eight years to write – so I have a lot to say about the different kinds of research I did in future posts – so do keep checking in!
