Historical tale set in Winchester, A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier

Submitted: 3rd September 2019

sWinchester Cathedral past comes to life with Tracy Chevalier

Historical tale set in Winchester, A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier – Imagine the setting – it’s during the war and women have little freedom. This novel tells the tale of Violet who falls in with the broderers, a disparate group of women charged with embroidering kneelers for the Cathedral, and is soon entwined in their lives and their secrets.

The cathedral is real, the embroidery is real and you can actually go and see what these women created. Now read the ficitonalised story of who they were and what they stood for…

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If you’d told me that a book about embroidery and needlepoint of tapestries and prayer stools set in and around Winchester Cathedral would be intriguing then I might have given you a funny look and doubted your judgement. When it’s the subject of a Tracy Chevalier novel however, it’s so much more than the sum of its parts and manages to weave its own kind of magic.

Novels which take a real person or persons and fictionalize their story whilst bringing in the historical aspects, political intrigue and battle of the sexes of times gone by are fascinating to me. It’s that idea of seeing an historical object or something old like a picture, prayer stool or wooden seat and imagining the fingerprints of time dotted across it just waiting to be discovered. This gives me all the feels and it’s like stepping back into a time machine and seeing history come alive.

The writing is also sublime as always. Tracy sets this story in the 1930s, the fall out of the First World War. She integrates herself into the lives of the women who learn needlepoint to be able to join the broderers group who work in the cathedral. Louisa Pesel was the head of this group and was a real life person!

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It’s from then on that we are totally and utterly immersed in the lives of these women. Women were expected to behave, to stay in their place and accept their lot in life. There were more women than men who could work after the devastation of war, however, women were still not as equal as men. This is a major theme in the novel and it’s sobering to read so many years later.

Despite the depression and the rumbles of another war, these women show amazing and admirable resilience. That is the story here and what a story it is.

Tracy writes at the end how visitors can still see the needlepoint seats in Winchester Cathedral. There’s a few more places to visit to see the work too. After reading this novel I’m going to try and go there if only to mentally shake hands with these women and their resilience when the world was as dark as it’s ever been.