A Shop Girl at Sea
Not another book about the Titanic? Well, not really. The eponymous shopgirl, Amelia, who works at a department store in Bath, does not board the doomed liner until chapter 9 and by chapter 27 it has sunk, leaving another 26 chapters to complete the book. Given that there are two stories told in parallel, the other concerning Amelia’s colleague, Ruby, Amelia spends only 10 of the 53 chapters at sea, including two on the rescue ship Carpathia. The sinking is principally a narrative device to bring Amelia and her lover together, while Ruby’s lesbian romance is entirely landlocked.
The theme in both stories is love versus duty, and as you would expect, love wins. The stories are well-crafted, and it is refreshing to have a romance (or two romances) centred on the protagonists’ working lives. We are used to hospital dramas, but here we have a shop. My only reservations are first that the emotional conflicts are resolved rather too easily without anybody getting hurt, other than those who richly deserve it (apart from the Titanic passengers of course), and second that the main characters always seem to be in a state of high emotion. But then it is difficult for us to relate to the intense sense of shame surrounding issues such as illegitimacy and homosexuality in Edwardian England, so perhaps they had reason to be overwrought.
This is the fifth in Brimble’s Shopgirl series set mainly in the Pennington department store in Bath, so if you like this book, there is more to choose from.
