"Ruth": from Fact to Fiction by Livi Michael

Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Ruth”: from lived experience to fiction, the novel she found hardest to write and which was banned and burned.

Ruth from Fact to FictionManchester 1849. Elizabeth Gaskell, newly famous author of Mary Barton, visits a young prostitute in Manchester’s New Bailey prison. The girl, known to us only as Pasley, had been abandoned in an orphanage in Dublin as a young child, apprenticed out in Manchester, raped at the age of fourteen, and had ended up on the streets. Elizabeth tried to help her, but few people in Victorian England would employ an ex-prostitute from prison. In desperation, Elizabeth wrote to Charles Dickens for help.My novel, Elizabeth and Ruth is based on the correspondence between Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens about this young girl. It tells her story, and the story of Elizabeth’s novel Ruth, which was based on Pasley’s story. According to her letters, it was the most difficult story Elizabeth ever wrote. It was banned and burned on publication.Yet it differs significantly from Pasley’s story and this lecture will investigate those differences, considering why Ruth, which was so controversial at the time, seems less so now. I will be looking particularly at the setting, the language and the gender politics of the novel, paying tribute to the fact that it is the first novel in English to feature a ‘fallen woman’ as heroine, while acknowledging all the things Elizabeth Gaskell was unable to say."

Date: 14 January 2026
Day: Wednesday, 1.00 pm
Venue: Manchester Central Library
Speaker: Livi Michael
Cost: members - free of charge
Cost: non-members - £5

Livi Michael has written novels for adults, young adults and children. Her twentieth novel, Reservoir, was published in March 2023 by Salt, and her 21st novel, Elizabeth and Ruth will be published by Salt in 2026. Her short stories have been published in various places including Granta, The Lonely Crowd and the Manchester Review, and have been long listed for the BBC National Short Story Award. Her play, Singers Not Sinners about the first three women who were allowed to sing in a choir ( Oldham 1701 was performed in Oldham in 2022.She has taught creative writing in various universities and for the Arvon foundation and was Programme Leader of the MA in Publishing at Manchester Metropolitan University. She currently runs a podcast about short stories with the writer and translator Sonya Moor.