The Choir
Childhood friends Eliza Kingwell and Ruth Henton live completely different lives. Eliza works herself to exhaustion caring for five energetic daughters and a cheating, abusive husband, while Ruth is a pampered diva in London, headlining Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and dining with the Prince of Wales. Fate intervenes and both women find themselves pinning their hopes for the future on the choral competition fad that sweeps late Victorian England.
Cram has carefully researched the art and social structure of community choir concerts, which offered the working classes in the early Industrial Age a measure of financial hope, cultural richness, and civic pride. Both Eliza and Ruth are blessed with exceptional talent, and music reunites the estranged friends when Ruth becomes a competition judge after losing her theatrical position, and Eliza summons the courage to help organize a local choir in the hopes of winning enough prize money to escape with her daughters from their grim factory-town life. Readers get a tour of the northern region of England as the two women connect and re-connect in Leeds, Whitby, Durham, and other bustling towns that host the various competitions, and find that female friendship can be more transformational than money or talent.
The dual points of view keep the narrative moving briskly, but Cram includes a wealth of domestic details and emotional highs and lows for the two women. Both are clever, principled characters the reader will enjoy spending time with, and while the novel’s conclusion might seem a bit too tidy for realism, it’s a satisfying, cozy read.
