I just want to echo everyone else and thank you for your wonderful summaries, Bishy. They made reading the novel so much more interesting and fun.
I have lots of thoughts about the novel, but they're quite random and incoherent... I liked it more than I expected I would by the end; I got turned off by the religious discourse early on, but was then won over again by the social justice message that Gaskell was trying to make so forcefully.
I agree it's very frustrating to see the 'fallen women' across different novels consistently die, but Ruth's death is an interesting variation because it's a martyr saint-like death, unlike the much grimmer deaths of Emma and Anna K. She does go out in a blaze of religious glory. So it's our first 'good death' rather than 'bad death', if that makes sense.
I thought that Bellingham/Donne was a very unsexy seducer figure. He had no charisma at all! I do really like the fact that Gaskell has him remain a cad to the end. I was aghast at his line to Benson: 'I cannot tell you how I regret that she should have died in consequence of her love of me.' (She did NOT die for love of you, you dickhead!) He's just so insanely self-centred!
I wasn't expecting the character reformation of Bradshaw: that was an interesting twist.
I also liked the introduction of Mr Davis, the surgeon who was an illegitimate child himself. Does that suggest that illegitimate sons have a better chance of thriving in Victorian society than their mothers? I'm glad he's around to take Leonard under his wing. Leonard will have a far happier fate than Emma Bovary's poor daughter! (and Emma's daughter was legitimate...)
I suppose my main complaint about the novel is that Ruth is too much a one-dimensional figure. Gaskell is so eager to exculpate her of guilt that she turns her into a purely saint-like figure. That fits with what you said, Sadik, about how Ruth is more a mirror to reflect other characters than a complex character in her own right. The other characters are allowed to have a more realistically human mix of virtues and imperfections.
I read the Penguin edition edited by Angus Easson, and I really liked his introduction (which I've just read). It made me see complexities in the novel I hadn't noticed.
Easson talks about how the novel challenges realist conventions by its emphasis on feeling as a source of truth, and how Ruth is very sensitive to beauty and nature, in the way of Wordsworth (Gaskell was a fan of Wordsworth apparently). This point made Ruth seem a more interesting character to me.
He also notices that the sequence of Bellingham/Donne becoming ill, and then Ruth becoming ill, happens in the novel twice. So the ending comes full circle as it were.
And he points out how Gaskell was keen to convey the idea that if a man seduces a woman, forcing her to marry him isn't necessarily a solution, as some in the 19th c. believed it to be. Ruth's refusal of Donne's offer of marriage is a feminist gesture.
Sorry for the long laundry list of points; my thoughts are a bit all over the place, as I said! Anyway this was certainly a novel that provided a lot of food for thought.