In the heat of a late June afternoon in 1854, abandoned by her panic-stricken mother in an all-too-obvious flight from the law, Millie Forester burst into Aggie Winkowski's life like a bolt from the blue.Aggie who was known hereabouts as 'Raggie Aggie', for trading in rags and old clothes was her long-established business, knew only too well the dangers waiting for such a strikingly pretty girl left alone in this rough and vice-ridden quarter, and knew she must take her in.

But what began as compassionate expediency led to the establishment of a new relationship that would grow and deepen, moulding Millie's destiny and giving new meaning to the life of Aggie Winkowski.

Millie Forester's advance through the coming years to the threshold of womanhood is the core of -THE RAG NYMPH- is gripping and socially concerned an historical novel as Catherine Cookson has ever written.Her superb skills of narrative and characterisation provide a spectrum of the good and evil of the Victorian era, frankly confronting the terrible menace of child corruption, which remains a constant issue in our own time.