Novice Threads (Silver Sampler Series)
1840s Scotland comes vividly to life in this novel about two young girls (“almost-sisters”) who grow up in this time and place. Margaret and Jessie both live in the same small town but in somewhat different economic circumstances. Margaret’s father, a tailor, and her mother, a seamstress, can afford to send Margaret to school. Jessie, on the other hand, lives with her single mother and grandmother on the very edge of dire poverty. After Jessie suffers family losses, she becomes a servant to a wealthy family in Edinburgh. Margaret then comes to join her when this family needs a tutor for their daughter. Years working together in this environment pull the girls even closer as changes in their employers’ family intersect with growing knowledge about their own personal family histories.
The prescribed roles for women in Victorian Scotland are writ large in this novel. Expectations for marriage and children are paramount, yet financial needs dictate which paths a woman may travel. Many young women worked in the local mills due to few other choices for employment for money needed to support a family. Seamstress skills in sewing clothes appear to accompany all the possible paths that a girl could choose or be forced into as well. In following Margaret and Jessie in gaining needed employment through domestic service and tutoring beyond the mills, the reader is drawn into this world of need and expectations. Readers curious about how people lived in the mid-19th century in Scotland will find much to relish in this engaging novel.
