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|b The ruined maid was as ancient a theme as balladry itself, and Hardy indited a poem with “The Ruined Maid” as its title in 1866; in 1891 he wrote his Tess of the d’Urvbervilles which embodies this theme in a poetic prose novel. The same incentive that drove Hardy to write his novel made an earlier writer, Elizabeth Gaskell, the mother of four lovely daughters, compose her Ruth (1853), in which she deals with the same theme in the most sympathetic manner, to show that a seduced young girl should not be condemned as a fallen woman, writing her off respectable society. It is a parable based on the story of Mary Magdalen and how Christ led her from vice into saintly virtue. Preceding both of these writers, Richardson wrote his epistolary epic of a novel Clarissa Harlowe(1847-9); Clarissa, a virtuous beauty, seduced treacherously by Lovelace, a villain driven by lust, seems to be the model tor both Ruth and Tess, seduced and raped by Bellingham and Alec, and left to face the consequences alone. A quick comparison between the two novelists Elizabeth gaskell and Thomas Hardy and their works show some interesting similarities and differences that might throw some light on the Victorian age in which both writers lived.
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