A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier: Book Review
Written by Anam Tariq, one of our literature writers, and edited by Stephanie O., our editor-in-chief!
It is 1932 and in the aftermath of the First World War, Violet Speedwell, mourning the loss of her fiancé and brother, is a ‘surplus woman’ — one of many such women who couldn’t find a husband since the War became a reason for the shortage of potential spouses.
“Tolerated with gentle exasperation by families, these women live at a time when society has rigid expectations of what a single woman might do with her life. Violet is about to challenge those restrictions.”
A Single Thread (2019) is a historical novel by Tracy Chevalier set in the twentieth century. It specifically features a detail about the First World War which I had never heard of before and that very aspect urged me to pick up this book. And that detail is the story of surplus women, those single women who were independent, earned a living for themselves, and enjoyed life on their own.
That’s why I relish reading classics and historical fiction. They give you insights about the past times, times which are gone, and which you can never find again. They tell you about sceneries that no longer exist. Like the rural Nebraska depicted by Willa Cather in My Ántonia (1918), before the coming of technology, war, and urban expansion.
A Single Thread is about the journey of Violet as she navigates the world as a single woman, at a time when spinsters were looked down upon. She represents how single women can also celebrate life as much as their married counterparts.
Violet moves to the city of Winchester to work and falls in with the broderers, a group of women embroidering kneelers and cushions for the city’s cathedral. There she finds friends and a community.
Apart from the story of Violet the novel also features explicit descriptions of the English landscape and the art of embroidery. The language of the literary work is in itself beautiful which reminds me of the Aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century that stressed on the notion “art for art’s sake”, that is, there is no relation between art and morality. Art is in itself exquisite and need not essentially convey a moral message. Aestheticism focussed on constant striving for beauty, escapism through literary and visual arts, craftsmanship and merging the arts of various media. I find all these characteristics in the works of Chevalier.
Her books focus more on the ornateness of language, the delineations, imagery, technique, and giving details about other media of arts as well (for instance the details about the art of embroidery in this novel). She is more about enjoying the literary work of art as an entity rather than giving a moral message. Check out this one instance where she captures the art of embroidery:
“She moved a kneeler … and studied it. It was a rectangle about nine by twelve inches with a mustard-coloured circle like a medallion in the centre surrounded by a mottled field of blue. The medallion design was of a bouquet of branches with chequer-capped acorns amongst blue-green foliage. Chequered acorns had been embroidered in the four corners as well. The colours were surprisingly bright, … It reminded Violet of the background of mediaeval tapestries with their intricate millefleurs arrangement of leaves and flowers.”
Further, Chevalier elucidates the English landscape and the countryside as she portrays Violet taking a solo walking trip through England during vacation:
“Violet gazed out over the rolls of land swelling before her, painted in myriad shades of green and yellow and brown, the sun and sky washing over it all. The English countryside was indeed glorious. But there was also a certain oppressiveness about it in August. The waves of heat just above the ground, the overbright sun, the stillness, the yellowed fields of wheat and hay and barley, the clumps of trees where the green had peaked…”
And so, I would call A Single Thread a light, handsome read serving as a means of escape from other dreary things that might be cluttering your mind.
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This piece was written by one of our opinion writers, Anam. Reach her at @anam.tariq_ on Instagram!
This piece was edited by our editor-in-chief, Stephanie O!
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