Last night when I was awake in the wee hours, I finished Tracy Chevalier’s new novel, A Single Thread. It was recommended by an algorithm. I had Audible credits piling up, and all my library holds are still weeks from becoming available. And the cover is appealing. And I’d spent a good deal of time in 1932 last summer with my grandmother’s love letters.
So. I gave it a whirl.
I did not recognize the author’s name because in the early aughts I was busy with small children and read nothing. I knew Girl with a Pearl Earring had been made into a movie because, well, Colin Firth. But I did not associate the author’s name with her work. (Embarrassing.)
Which is to say: I went in cold. No expectations.
Historical fiction is tricky, something I learned when my children were young, and I read Marguerite de Angeli‘s The Door in the Wall with them. I had seen it at school and in the library when I was a child, but I had not read it. It won the Newbury in 1950 and is well-loved, “a classic.”
I hated it. Viscerally.
In college I had studied medieval literature with a brilliant young professor, and she had awakened me to the foreignness of places in time, to a world that was shaped and viewed so differently from ours, and not only in terms of electricity and modern conveniences. Or religion and reason.
Now, I haven’t re-read it recently, so I am willing to admit that I could be quite wrong, but my memory is that The Door in the Wall seemed like modern people with modern sensibilities wearing charming costumes.
When I was a child, my father read de Angeli’s earlier book, Henner’s Lydia, aloud to me. The rumble of his chest, the scent of his clothes, the illustrations—all real and immediate in my memory. So I felt betrayed by The Door.
At any rate. I learned then that one must approach historical fiction with caution.
Tracy Chevalier has done her research. The details are right. But I did not feel I was in 1932. And that is partly the fault of my grandmother’s letters, but also Barbara Pym. Although it takes place in 1950, Pym’s Excellent Women also features single women, post-war. Different war, similar challenges. Pym so masterfully portrays a sophisticated interior life that is shaped by forces that are alien to our sensibilities.
Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy A Single Thread. I did.
Like Violet, I had a grand walking adventure in England several summers ago. And, like Violet, my reasons for choosing that particular walk were privately complicated.
On that walk, I spent some time in Hexham, where I was especially struck by the embroidered kneelers in the Cathedral.
The patterns are not varied, as the ones in A Single Thread, but the colors are as vibrant.
I was struck by how much they light up the dark space, in just way that Chevalier describes the kneelers in Winchester Cathedral.
The dapper older gentleman in sassy peach-colored trousers was amused by my interest. He couldn’t give me any details when I asked, brushed me off, said something about the guild. It was a moment where you can’t say you don’t understand what someone means because they clearly cannot understand why you would be interested.
I love stories behind stories, and that was the appeal of A Single Thread, that Chevalier shone a light on an aspect of communal life that is at once taken for granted, assumed, and also so obvious that it is hidden, unspoken.
It was also pleasant for me to remember my trip to England, because shortly after I had a health crisis that has become a Great Divide. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest, people I met divided their lives into “before” and “after” the eruption of Mount St. Helen’s. Mortal Peril for me functions in that same way, and my life before seems remote, inaccessible.
And the peril naturally made me both more aware of my own mortality and the fact that I survived and escaped the devastation my siblings did not. Which is not the same as surviving a World War that has erased a generation of men, as is the case for the women in The Single Thread. But my own survival changed the way I see the world and read stories.