A fifteen-year-old dressmaker's apprentice is seduced and abandoned, and a dissenting minister and his sister take her in and pass her off as a widow - a lie that must eventually be paid for by someone. Gaskell, a Manchester minister's wife, published this in 1853; readers burned it, two men in her husband's congregation forbade their wives to read it, and she wrote that she felt like St Sebastian. It is the first English novel to treat a fallen woman as a person.