The Ruined Maid
poem
"The Ruined Maid" is a satirical poem by Thomas Hardy. It was written in 1866 but first published, in a slightly bowdlerized form, in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901).
Overview
Thomas Hardy's "The Ruined Maid" is a poem about a woman who loses her purity or virginity during the Victorian Era, which is looked down upon. This poem displays how the ruined maid sees herself, but also how society sees her. Though the poem takes on real issues of culture during the Victorian Era, Hardy intended this poem to be light-hearted.
The poem is presented a conversation between two people. To depict this, Hardy uses two voices: For the ruined maid he uses proper English, and for the other person he uses a working-class dialect. The poem features a couplet rhyme scheme which can often be found in satirical poetry. This form is also known as an "aabb" rhyme scheme because every two lines rhyme in each stanza.
Text
Analysis
The poem depicts a young country girl who has become a rich man's mistress to escape her own poverty, and does not seem to regret her decision.
“The Ruined Maid” enters the record as poem. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ruined, Maid and poem can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7761796. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1866 and 1901.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Ruined Maid” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.