![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book Review: The Hired Girl
Jul. 15th, 2022 07:25 amI liked Laura Amy Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! so much that I picked up her book The Hired Girl more or less sight unseen.
Fortunately it turned out to be wonderful, too. Our heroine, Joan Skraggs, is a bright but imperfected educated fourteen-year-old farmgirl, whose favorite teacher has given her three books for her personal library: Jane Eyre, Ivanhoe, and Dombey and Sons. The book is in the form of Joan’s diary, and she writes exactly the kind of breathless, occasionally-attempting-to-be-hifalutin style that you would expect for a girl who has practically lived in those three books.
After her father forces her to quit school, Joan runs away from home and ends up as a hired girl in a Jewish household in Baltimore. Joan herself is Catholic, and everything she knows about Jews comes from Ivanhoe. The book does a wonderful job exploring Joan’s increasing knowledge of the Jewish world of early twentieth-century America (her employers, the Rosenbachs, are Reform Jews who sometimes serve oysters, but draw the line at pork), as well as her own Catholic faith. Detailed, nuanced, never info-dumpy: really an excellent example of historical fiction engaging with religion in an engaging and respectful way.
Likewise, everything Joan knows about service comes from Jane Eyre. (She even introduces herself under the false name “Janet,” a pet name Rochester sometimes uses for Jane. She also informs them that she is eighteen.) Inevitably, she gets a little crush on Solly, the eldest son who first brought her to the house, then Moritz, the master of the house, and then finally on David, the youngest son, a budding artist, who wants her to model for a painting of Joan of Arc.
( Spoilers, but I’m going to tell you in advance that this does not go nearly as badly as it could )
Fortunately it turned out to be wonderful, too. Our heroine, Joan Skraggs, is a bright but imperfected educated fourteen-year-old farmgirl, whose favorite teacher has given her three books for her personal library: Jane Eyre, Ivanhoe, and Dombey and Sons. The book is in the form of Joan’s diary, and she writes exactly the kind of breathless, occasionally-attempting-to-be-hifalutin style that you would expect for a girl who has practically lived in those three books.
After her father forces her to quit school, Joan runs away from home and ends up as a hired girl in a Jewish household in Baltimore. Joan herself is Catholic, and everything she knows about Jews comes from Ivanhoe. The book does a wonderful job exploring Joan’s increasing knowledge of the Jewish world of early twentieth-century America (her employers, the Rosenbachs, are Reform Jews who sometimes serve oysters, but draw the line at pork), as well as her own Catholic faith. Detailed, nuanced, never info-dumpy: really an excellent example of historical fiction engaging with religion in an engaging and respectful way.
Likewise, everything Joan knows about service comes from Jane Eyre. (She even introduces herself under the false name “Janet,” a pet name Rochester sometimes uses for Jane. She also informs them that she is eighteen.) Inevitably, she gets a little crush on Solly, the eldest son who first brought her to the house, then Moritz, the master of the house, and then finally on David, the youngest son, a budding artist, who wants her to model for a painting of Joan of Arc.
( Spoilers, but I’m going to tell you in advance that this does not go nearly as badly as it could )
