The Daring Ladies of Lowell by Kate Alcott

I tried to reimagine the rooms that are still there and fill them with busy people, all of them trying to wash their faces at the same time and finish their breakfasts and then run to be at the looms at the same time.” I went with a friend, and we were pretty much the only ones there. She took a one-day research visit to Lowell, where she visited boarding houses and a weaving room at the Lowell National Historical Park. “These girls were working 13- or 14-hour days and attending lectures at night and educating themselves, and I found it kind of remarkable,” she said by phone from her home in Washington D.C. O’Brien was looking for a follow-up to her first novel under the Alcott name, 2012’s “The Dressmaker,” when she came across the Lowell Offering, a periodical published by the mill girls themselves in the 1840s, featuring their own stories, poems, and essays.

“They had to have a system in place where the parents of these girls would feel that they would be safe,” Herlihy said. If they were not married, they were required to live in a boardinghouse. The mill workers were girls and young women aged roughly 13-30, says Jack Herlihy, a museum specialist at Lowell National Historical Park. Barrow finds her work and budding romance with mill owner’s son Samuel Fiske thrown into turmoil by the murder of her friend Cornell.

Her heroine is 20-year-old Alice Barrow, who escapes the grim life on her father’s New Hampshire farm to join the young women flocking to Lowell’s mills. O’Brien moved the story from Fall River to Lowell for her novel, “The Daring Ladies of Lowell,” but retained the names and the forensic detail. O’Brien was researching a novel about the mill girls of Lowell - writing under the pen name Kate Alcott - when she came upon the story of Cornell’s murder in “Fall River: An Authentic Narrative,” an 1834 account by Catherine Read Williams available via Google, and in Kasserman’s history. “That’s what happened with Sarah Cornell, and that got to me.” “The thing that blew me away when I was reading the testimony was, the defense of the person accused of murder depends on tearing apart the reputation of the woman murdered,” said writer Patricia O’Brien. Other issues raised by the trial remain vital to this day. “So the Methodists were as much threatened by the implication of the trial as the mill owners were” and rose to Avery’s defense. But they were criticized because they were fired by emotion,” Kasserman said. It seems weird to think of Methodists as radical, but they were in Presbyterian-centered New England. “On the other side, the Methodists were seen as a very radical form of religion. “ ‘Don’t send your daughter to the mill town - see what happens to them?’ ” As a result, mill owners were eager to see Avery convicted to show they were protecting their workers. Avery’s murder threatened “the social acceptability of the primary mechanism by which the cotton mills got their labor,” Kasserman said.

The Daring Ladies of Lowell by Kate Alcott