This course will study two novels by Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskell was a hugely successful and popular nineteenth-century novelist who used her fiction to explore issues surrounding industrialisation, Chartism, the condition of England, position of women, class barriers and prejudice and provincial town life. We will be studying Gaskell’s 1853 novel Ruth in which the author provides a compassionate exploration of the plight of a fallen woman and Gaskell’s final, unfinished novel Wives and Daughters (1864-1866) which considers, amongst other things, the position of women, provincial life and issues of class