The Ruined Maid

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, sexual content, and death by suicide.

Hardy was acutely aware of the miseries that can arise from a zealous insistence on moral rectitude, particularly in matters of sexuality and marriage, especially concerning women. This was why he was on ’Melia’s side in “The Ruined Maid.” Thirty-five years after writing that poem, and in the same year as its publication, Hardy returned to the same theme in the short lyric poem, “A Daughter Returns” (published in Hardy’s Winter Words in 1928). The poem shines a light on another “fallen” woman who was not as fortunate as ’Melia appears to have been—or perhaps shows what might have happened had ’Melia ever decided to return home. 

“A Daughter Returns” is told from the point of view of the father, whose daughter returns home after a one-year absence. She now looks and sounds quite different, with “dainty-cut raiment, earrings of pearl,” and a different way of speaking, which echoes ’Melia’s appearance and bearing in “The Ruined Maid.” Knowing she is no longer “innocent” (i.e., not a virgin), her father turns her away, telling her not to return.