When the girl’s death is labeled suicide-this woman of “dubious character and loose morals“-Alice inhales for the first time the smell of her own grief. Part of the battle is also the bourgeoning romance between Alice and Samuel Fiske, Hiram’s eldest son (and the expected inheritor of the family enterprise). The action is propelled by the discovery of one of the mill girls, found hanged in what could quite possibly be murder. But like many others who work for the mill owners, Stanhope is afraid of losing his own job. In desperation, Alice visits conflicted town doctor Benjamin Stanhope, pleading with him to improve the quality of the air in the mill-or at least get the Friske family to agree to open a window. Alice soon comes to see Lovey as a girl with great spirit, a girl who wants people to believe she’s reckless and perhaps not that smart.įraming her story around the friendship between the girls, Alcott presents the social and economic mores of the time: the dangers of working in the cotton mills, the suffocating atmosphere, and the hammering, pulsating noise of the looms, the lint and fibers that gather in the girls’ lungs as they cough up the cotton balls, and the treachery of having their hair caught in the constantly moving rubber belts. At once she befriends Sarah “Lovey” Cornell the two share private intimacies under the light of a gibbous moon. Alice is well aware that she needs to find her place in a world where conduct is watched and church is mandatory.
Against this background, farm girl Alice Barrow arrives to board in the darkened dormitory of Boott Boardinghouse in a world of starvation wages and the piercing shriek of the 4:30am factory whistle. The beautiful Pawtucket Falls turns the wheel that makes the looms work prosper, and the Lowell Bank whispers promises for those who are saving their money. Financial interests strike like lightning in the life of family patriarch Hiram Fiske, who has spent much of his capital on developing the acreage of Lowell, a town growing at an unprecedented rate. As fortunes are made, the wealthy Fiske family jockey for position, all too willing to exploit the cheap labor in the form of farm girls who are paid a small wage and expected to board at their cotton mills.
The purchase of real estate, the might of industrialization, and the power of invention are pushing rural towns to grow and expand. Alcott’s lively, crisp prose explores the idiosyncratic colors of humanity in time period when the rural is transforming into the industrial and class distinctions are gradually collapsing. The tale is nonetheless always compelling. Resorting to the clichés of historical romance novels, Alcott tells her story through the eyes of a strong male who lacks courage and is at first attentive to his fragile naïf but becomes withdrawn as more questions about her friend’s death arise.
Book review: Kate Alcott's *The Daring Ladies of Lowell*
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