The Full Text of “The Ruined Maid”
1"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
2Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
3And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —
4"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.
5— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
6Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
7And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —
8"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.
9— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'
10And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now
11Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —
12"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.
13— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
14But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
15And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —
16"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.
17— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
18And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem
19To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" —
20"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.
21— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
22And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —
23"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
24Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.
The Full Text of “The Ruined Maid”
1"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
2Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
3And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —
4"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.
5— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
6Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
7And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —
8"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.
9— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'
10And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now
11Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —
12"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.
13— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
14But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
15And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —
16"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.
17— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
18And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem
19To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" —
20"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.
21— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
22And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —
23"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
24Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.
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“The Ruined Maid” Introduction
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"The Ruined Maid" is Thomas Hardy's bitterly funny critique of Victorian sexual hypocrisy, written in 1866. The poem's speakers are a pair of former neighbors who find themselves in very different circumstances: there's Amelia, who has been "ruined" by becoming a rich man's mistress and now lives a life of luxury in the city, and her unnamed friend, who still toils in the poverty of their rural hometown. Being "ruined," the poem suggests, is (ironically) a big improvement on a life of impoverished misery. But Victorian double-standards about women's sexuality means that Amelia's freedom comes at a cost: she may be wealthier and classier now, but she's forever excluded from respectable society, and reliant for her position on a man whom society lets off scot-free for his part in this ruination.
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“The Ruined Maid” Summary
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"Oh Amelia, my dear, this beats everything! Who would have thought that I'd run into you in the city? And where did you get such beautiful clothes, such wealth?" "Oh, didn't you know I'm a ruined woman?" she replied.
"When you left home, you were dressed in rags, and barefoot, and tired of digging up potatoes and weeding. Now you've got beautiful bracelets and three colorful feathers in your hat!" "Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," she replied.
"At home on the farm you talked like a country person, saying 'thee' and 'thou' and 'thik oon,' and 'theäs oon,' and 't'other': but now your accent makes you ready to hobnob with the upper class!" "One gets more sophisticated when one has been ruined," she replied.
"Your hands used to be rough like paws, and your face was pale and haggard, but now I'm amazed by your beautiful complexion, and your little gloves fit like a rich woman's!" "We don't have to work when we're ruined," she replied.
"You used to say that life at home was a nightmare, and you'd sigh and grumble. But now you seem so far from misery and depression." "True. One's pretty cheerful when one's been ruined," she replied.
"I wish I had elegant clothes and a lovely face, and could walk around town with pride!" "My dear: an unrefined country girl like you can't really expect that kind of life. You haven't been ruined," she replied.
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“The Ruined Maid” Themes
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Victorian Sexual Hypocrisy
Presented as a conversation between a well-to-do young woman and her impoverished hometown friend, “The Ruined Maid” takes an ironic perspective on Victorian sexism. Amelia, despite being supposedly “ruined” by her unmarried love affair with a rich man, is living a much more comfortable life than the friend she speaks to. The poem critiques the conventional Victorian attitude that would condemn this “ruined maid” (but not her boyfriend): if ruination is so terrible, the poem asks, why does being an unruined maid seem like the worse option?
The poem observes that, if a woman chose to trade her sexuality for financial security, she could lift herself out of poverty, but she’d be socially punished for making this pragmatic choice. That the sexual option seems like the brighter side in this poem is not an embrace of women’s sexual liberation, but rather a critique of economic and moral strictures that left working-class women in a double bind: sell your sexuality and be “ruined,” or stay “pure” and poor.
When Amelia’s friend questions her about her new wealth and elegance, Amelia replies to every inquiry with a flippant reference to her ruination. Amelia’s sophisticated shamelessness reflects the irony of her situation: all her new pleasures and privileges tie directly back into her disreputable life as a mistress.
As Amelia’s friend wonders at Amelia’s new lease on life, she covers everything from clothing to mood. Amelia’s situation is improved on every level. Amelia’s friend, meanwhile, describes Amelia’s former life as one of grotesque poverty—with the implication that her own life is still just as bleak. Not being “ruined” sounds desperately awful: the friend speaks of grubbing around in dirt, freezing, and wearing rags. Her talk of “melancholy” suggests that her poverty isn’t just physically hard, but soul-corroding. By the end of the poem, her open envy of Amelia speaks to how much she’s suffering.
The contrast between Amelia’s voice and her friend’s suggests that Amelia has made her way into a higher echelon of Victorian society. The friend points out that Amelia’s changed accent “fits ‘ee for high compa-ny.” Amelia replies that to be ruined gives one “polish”—but drops briefly back into her old accent at the end of the poem to tell her friend that a woman “such as you be” can’t rise to this polished state if she “ain’t ruined.”
This condescending, confidential aside suggests that Amelia is well aware of the choice she’s made, and the pretense she has to keep up. Maintaining her status means concealing her origins, pretending to be respectable, though the world will always judge her. Amelia can’t fully join the respectable world she now lives in proximity to, precisely because she’s “ruined.”
Amelia’s comfort and status thus come at a cost: though she’s flippant about being “ruined,” it’s a grim fact that her new position will forever exclude her from respectable society, and her privileges are dependent on the whim of a man whom society will not judge nearly as harshly. To that end, there’s a missing character in this exchange: the man who “ruined” Amelia. His role in the situation is only implied; ruination falls only on the female partner in this arrangement. Yet Amelia's choice to become this man’s mistress is presented with great sympathy: who wouldn’t choose to be “ruined” if it meant escaping a life of deadening poverty?
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Ruined Maid”
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Lines 1-4
"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —
"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she."The Ruined Maid" makes the reader into an eavesdropper. The poem launches right into a dialogue between two young women meeting in the street, and that dialogue is pretty telling.
From the very start of the poem, the reader has a sense of what kind of person the first of these two speakers is. Her cheery, colloquial greeting—"'O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!'"—lets the reader know a great deal about her. She's friendly, she's enthusiastic, she's jolly—and she's lower-class. A Victorian reader might even be able to guess that she's from the countryside from this very first line; a modern-day reader will catch up as soon as she cries, "'Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?'" That important-sounding capital T on "Town" suggests that this cheery lady might be the type to look up in awe at all the tall buildings.
The Amelia she's just met, meanwhile, seems like a different character altogether. Even from these first few lines, the reader can gather that Amelia has changed a lot since the last time her friend saw her. Not only has she come to "Town," she's well-dressed and wealthy now—with the implication that she absolutely wasn't before.
She's got an easy explanation for this, though, and her reply characterizes her as clearly as her friend's cheerful chatter. She answers her friend's astonished questions almost with a yawn: "'O didn't you know I'd been ruined?' said she."
It's here that the poem's profound irony kicks into gear. Amelia describes being "ruined"—that is, becoming an unmarried mistress, a serious sin in the eyes of Victorian society—as casually as she might describe getting a new pair of shoes. Not only does she take this ruination lightly, it seems to be the source of a whole new life for her—and one that seems to be treating her pretty well.
Her voice is also very different from her friend's: none of that thick accent, and none of that enthusiastic exclaiming. She's adopted an upper-class voice as well as an upper-class presentation.
The poem's use of overheard dialogue here thus makes a lot of thematic sense: it's as if the reader has become a passerby in the street, turning an ear to all the hot gossip. The steady rhyme scheme—AABB, a set of rhyming couplets—adds to the light, bouncy atmosphere, cluing readers into the fact that the poem is satirical. The same can be said for the poem's meter, anapestic tetrameter with an iamb thrown in at the start of lines (an anapest goes da-da-DUM while an iamb da-DUM):
"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town? -
Lines 5-8
— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —
"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she. -
Lines 9-12
— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'
And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now
Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —
"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she. -
Lines 13-16
— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —
"We never do work when we're ruined," said she. -
Lines 17-20
— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem
To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" —
"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she. -
Lines 21-24
— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —
"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.
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“The Ruined Maid” Symbols
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Clothing
Clothing, in this poem, is a complex symbol of status, reflecting both the pressures and the instability of women's roles in Victorian society.
The first thing Amelia's friend notices about her is her "fair garments," which signal Amelia's new wealth. The friend returns and returns to Amelia's clothing, noting "gay bracelets," "bright feathers," "little gloves," and a "fine sweeping gown." These are all displays of luxury, reflecting Amelia's rise in society—but they're also a means of concealment. That Amelia's gown is "sweeping" hints at how she's sweeping more than a few things under the rug here (for example, the supposedly immoral circumstances that led to her new life).
Her new clothing makes her look like a wealthy upper-class lady, but it can't stop society from considering her "ruined." Clothing, then, reflects not only status but also the hollowness and fragility of that status. Whether in the "tatters" of a poor farmer or the "gay bracelets" of a mistress, a woman's essential dilemma is the same: she's at the mercy of oppressive male ideas about her sexuality.
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Country and Town
The country and the town here symbolize multiple divisions in the poem: there's the literal rural/urban divide, but there's also the split between the poor and the wealthy—and, by implication, the division between women who are "pure" and women who are "ruined."
Whenever Amelia's friend refers to the city, she does it with a capital letter: it's never "town," but "Town." This suggests that Town has a special grandeur and importance. Being of the Town means being worldly and wealthy, but also (in the eyes of the world) corrupted.
The countryside of "the barton," meanwhile, produces women who are "raw," unrefined and poor. That place of impoverished exile, the poem suggests, is the place that working-class women who play by the rules and don't make use of their sexuality are likely to get stuck in.
This division would have been especially meaningful to a Victorian audience, who watched (often with dismay) as England's economy—once primarily rural—moved into wealthy cities, leaving country people to struggle.
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“The Ruined Maid” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration helps to give the reader the flavor of Amelia's friend's chatter. Working alongside the poem's bouncy meter, alliteration evokes the inescapable energy of the friend's conversation as she wonders at her old neighbor's transformation.
Take a look at how this works in the second stanza:
— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —
"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.Alliteration works here to create that special feeling of being stopped in the street by a chatty old friend when perhaps you'd rather not be recognized: the repetition of sharp /t/ and blunt /d/ and /b/ sounds batters away at Amelia's facade of elegance. By contrast, Amelia's own speech is usually much softer—any alliteration that appears is typically on the gentle /w/ sound ("we [...] when we're").
Elsewhere, alliteration also helps to evoke the distance between Amelia's dismal past (and the friend's dismal present) and her fancy new life:
— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —Here, alliteration on /b/ shows the transition between Amelia's miserable "blue and bleak" past face and her "bewitching" present face, and the repetition of light /l/ sounds emphasizes her new ladylike delicacy. Again, Amelia's own speech sounds soft by comparison—characterized by those /w/ sounds:
"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.
The only time Amelia's speech gets a little feistier is at the very end of the poem, when she dips back into her country accent and her final two lines are marked by sharp alliteration of the hard /k/ sound:
"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. [...]- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Assonance
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Polysyndeton
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Caesura
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Colloquialism
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End-Stopped Line
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Enjambment
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Refrain
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Irony
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Juxtaposition
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Sibilance
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Metaphor
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"The Ruined Maid" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- "this does everything crown!"
- Whence
- Fair garments
- Prosperity
- Ruined
- Tatters
- Spudding up docks
- Gay
- Barton
- "thee' and thou,' / And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'"
- Polish
- Blue and bleak
- Hag-ridden dream
- Sock
- Megrims
- Melancho-ly
- Raw
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An exclamation of surprise, something like "doesn't that beat everything!"
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Ruined Maid”
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Form
"The Ruined Maid" uses six quatrains, each made up of two rhyming couplets. It's the patterns within these regular quatrains that give the poem its flavor.
The poem is a dialogue between two former friends: one chatty and countrified, one haughty and sophisticated. Take a look at the first stanza:
"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —
"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.The shape of this exchange, in which the friend cheerfully babbles for the first three lines and Amelia responds with a curt, flippant reference to her ruination, repeats through almost the whole poem. This pattern gives the reader a sense of these two women's different characters—and of the new contrast between two people who used to be very similar.
It's only in the last stanza that something changes:
— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —
"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.At the poem's punchline, Amelia takes two lines rather than her usual one to dampen her friend's envious longing for her wealth and sophistication, driving home the point the poem has been insisting on all along.
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Meter
The anapestic tetrameter of "The Ruined Maid" is a rollicking, speedy meter that suits the poem's ironic humor. (This meter might be familiar to readers from the works of Dr. Seuss.) An anapest is a poetic foot with a da-da-DUM rhythm, and tetrameter just means there are four metrical feet per line.
But this isn't pure anapestic tetrameter: most lines actually start with an iamb (da-DUM). In those lines, the rhythm looks like this:
Who could | have supposed | I should meet | you in Town?
Notice how, in this example, the stress pattern helps the reader to hear the friend's voice: "Who could have supposed?" evokes a different accent than "Who could have supposed?" Similarly, the meter means that the friend often leans on an unusual syllable, saying "prosperi-ty," "compa-ny," "la-dy,"and "melancho-ly"—a rusticated speech pattern that Hardy emphasizes even further with those hyphens.
There's a related (but opposite) effect in lines 24-25:
"My dear | — a raw coun- | try girl, such | as you be,
Cannot quite | expect that. | You ain't ru- | ined," said she.The anapests (da-da-DUM) that kick off that final line gives the reader a strong sense of the elegant accent Amelia is putting on: "Cannot quite expect that" stresses "quite" and "that" with a touch of haughty disdain. This effect is especially potent in contrast with Amelia's mocking dip into her former dialect when she says "such as you be" and "ain't."
The meter also strengthens the contrast between Amelia and her friend in a subtler way. While Amelia's friend's dialogue takes up full lines, Amelia's speeches are curter: the tag "said she" at the end of each of her lines means she has even less than a line to say herself, making her replies seem clipped and dismissive.
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Rhyme Scheme
"The Ruined Maid" uses a jaunty pattern of rhymed couplets, running:
AABB
Importantly, that BB rhyme remains steady all through the poem: the last two lines always rhyme on a long /ee/ sound, so that each stanza can conclude with the words "said she."
This rhyme scheme is lively and bouncy, evoking the friend's countrified babbling. But it also underlines the poem's irony. It's not just the words "said she" that repeat, but the words, "'ruined,' said she." That ever-repeated B rhyme insists that all the new luxuries of Amelia's life are the result of her ruination. Everything comes back to being ruined—literally.
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“The Ruined Maid” Speaker
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Accent is a huge part of how people read social class, and it was an especially meaningful signifier in 19th-century England—where (as anyone who's seen My Fair Lady or Pygmalion will know), one's patterns of speech could unlock, or lock, whole worlds. So the two very different voices of the speakers in this poem tell the reader a lot about their personalities and circumstances.
The first voice the poem introduces is that of Amelia's unnamed friend, a sweet, rusticated girl with a thick rural accent. Friendly and ingenuous, this girl also comes across as a bit of a yokel as she marvels openly at Amelia's new wealth. Her harrowing descriptions of Amelia's past suggest that she herself is still living a life of exhausting poverty. Perhaps there's also a hint, as the poem goes on, that some of her friendliness is masked spite: she doesn't seem willing to let Amelia forget exactly how terrible things used to be for her.
In reply to her friend's persistence and enthusiasm, Amelia only drawls. Her "ruination" has given her a new upper-class voice and a new upper-class attitude; she's sophisticated, flippant, and condescending. But as her switch back into her former dialect (note that colloquial "ain't") at the end of the poem indicates, this is as much a defensive posture as a true change. Ruination means that, while Amelia is living a life of luxury, she's also living in the margins, and she has to double down on her performance of upper-classness in order to endure the sexist judgments of Victorian society.
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“The Ruined Maid” Setting
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The poem is set in "town"—that is, the city, as opposed to the countryside that Amelia came from. There's more to be learned about "town" from the friend's description of Amelia's muddy, potato-filled origins than from any direct description of town itself: town, the reader gathers is everything that the countryside is not. Through the friend's marvel at Amelia's elegant clothes and delicate complexion, the reader learns that "town" is a place of wealth, refinement, and leisure, as opposed to the grimy and impoverished rural village where Amelia and her friend once toiled together.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Ruined Maid”
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Literary Context
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English poet and a novelist, known for his passionate opposition to the cruelty and hypocrisy of the buttoned-up Victorian world he was born into. Though Hardy is best known now for novels like Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, these frank and shocking books weren't especially well-received during his lifetime, and he made his reputation as a poet. His life spanned both high Victorian propriety and the horrific disillusionment of World War I; his work is both righteously angry and pessimistic.
Hardy was deeply influenced by his rural upbringing in Dorset, where he saw first-hand the kind of suffering he describes in "The Ruined Maid." Many of his books and poems are set in a fictionalized version of his home county, which he renamed "Wessex" and elaborated as thoroughly as Tolkien elaborated his Middle-earth. Hardy's friend William Barnes, who was similarly interested in rural identity and dialect, was a big influence on him. In his passionate denouncement of sexual hypocrisy and misogyny, Hardy also followed in the footsteps of thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Hardy was well-known during his own lifetime, and was a public figure as well as a literary man. His political outrage and naturalistic ear for voice in turn influenced any number of later writers, from Yeats to Woolf to Sassoon.
Historical Context
In 1866, when "The Ruined Maid" was written, England was at the height of its power and prosperity. It was also a world of deep divisions between the rich and the poor, the upper classes and the lower classes, and men and women. "The Ruined Maid" casts a jaded eye on a plain fact of the Victorian woman's life: female sexuality was demonized and exploited by men at exactly the same time.
The reign of Queen Victoria was a paradoxical time for women. On the one hand, Victoria was the first queen to wield any real power since Elizabeth I, and she was a beloved and successful ruler, presiding over the vast British Empire. But just as Elizabeth had to present herself as an eternal Diana-like virgin goddess to maintain power in a man's world, Victoria had to be a model of strict female propriety, and the world around her reflected those strictures.
The Victorian era was a difficult time to be a woman. Sexuality was off-limits outside the confines of marriage—but only for women; men could essentially do what they liked and get away with it. This double standard left a lot of women in desperate circumstances. If a woman was known to have had sex outside wedlock (or to have had a child), she was likely to be cast out of respectable society altogether, and perhaps forced into prostitution.
This problem was exacerbated by sharp class divisions and a serious wealth divide. The Industrial Revolution was changing the world, and as Hardy's rural maid notes, life in the countryside was not getting any easier as wealth moved into the cities. "Ruination" by a rich man might indeed look like a pretty cushy option to a starving farmworker—at least, until the rich man got tired of her.
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More “The Ruined Maid” Resources
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External Resources
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More on Hardy's Life and Work — A short biography of Hardy and links to more of his poetry.
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Hardy's Anti-Sexist Writing — A piece in The Atlantic about Hardy's literary pushback against Victorian sexism.
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The Hardy Society — The official website of the Hardy Society, dedicating to promoting "understanding and appreciation of the life and works of the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy."
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A Dramatization of the Poem — Watch a video of the poem being performed as a little play.
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Portrayals of Sexism in Hardy's Writing — A piece about the different faces of Victorian sexism in Hardy's Tess of the D'urbervilles—a famous novel with themes similar to those of "The Ruined Maid."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Thomas Hardy
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