A sympathetic view of the fallen women in Victorian England begins in the novel. First published in 1984, this book shows that the fallen woman in the nineteenth-century novel is, amongst other things, a direct response to the new society. Through the examination of Dickens, Gaskell, Collins, Moore, Trollope, Gissing and Hardy, it demonstrates that the fallen woman is the first in a long line of sympathetic creations which clash with many prevailing social attitudes, and especially with the supposedly accepted dichotomy of the ‘two women’.