Just twice in Tracy Chevalier’s bittersweet new novel does its heroine, Violet Speedwell, think to herself: “I want to do that.” Her wishes are self-sacrificing enough: to embroider a kneeler in Winchester Cathedral and to ring its bells. Given that the year is 1932, the first is more easily realised than the second, yet both, in their way, are radical.
Don’t be fooled by the ecclesiastical backdrop. For Violet, who lost first her fiance and then a brother to the trenches, God died in the great war. More than 16 years have since passed but only now, as a 38-year-old spinster, has she finally plucked up the nerve to leave behind her overbearing mother and their Southampton home and make a life of her own.
Violet is one of the so-called “surplus women” created by the war’s casualties and the resulting gender imbalance. It’s a stigma that smarts every time a stranger shoots a glance at her naked ring finger; she feels it still more acutely in the drab struggle to support herself. A typist for an insurance firm, her salary is “rather like a pair of ill-fitting shoes that could be worn, but that pinched and rubbed and left calluses”. She’s often starving.
Winchester’s squat cathedral is a stroll away from where she rooms, and nonbeliever though she’s become, evensong soothes her. It’s there that she spots the brightly coloured cushions, each marked with the initials of the woman who stitched it. Thrilled by the notion of leaving a mark of her own, Violet joins the volunteer “broderers”, finding purpose in their often prickly companionship. Soon, she’s haggling for a pay rise, crushing on an older man and striding off into the countryside on a solo walking holiday. But in a society that remains set up for marriage, calamity stalks her.
You’ll hear echoes of the estimable Barbara Pym as Violet’s heels clip across the cathedral’s inner close. Allusions to casual sex and lesbian passion notwithstanding, days are punctuated by cups of tea and people remain largely trapped by their manners. At one particularly stirring moment, instead of finding herself kissed, Violet is treated to a three-course meal, with custard on her apple crumble and cream in her coffee. “Afterwards she felt almost sated,” Chevalier deadpans. Meanwhile, on the wireless, news of Adolf Hitler’s election in Germany casts an ominous shadow.
It’s a time and a place that is perfectly suited to Chevalier’s meticulous scene-setting, gentle pacing and gimlet eye for hidden hurts and secret longings. As for the embroidery, with its repetitive stitches that slowly, almost inconspicuously add up to something dazzling, she couldn’t have picked a more satisfying metaphor. After all, Violet and her fellow broderers are women building not only themselves, but the very idea of independent single womanhood in a world that does its best to ignore their existence.
• A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier is published by The Borough Press (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
