The Chainmakers' Daughter

"Some make chains. Some wear them." Rosie Wallace survives on three slices of bread a day. Scarred by flame and metal, she makes her life as her ancestors have: making chains for the rich chain master, Matthew Joshua. There is no hope for a better future. No hope even for a green vegetable on the table. Her life will be making chains, marrying Jack, the boy she loves, and babies every year. But when an assault by the chain master's son threatens the very fabric of her tenuous existence, Rosie finds the courage and the reason to fight for her survival and the lives of her family and neighbours. Set in the first decade of the 20th century The Chainmakers' Daughter is a haunting portrayal of abject poverty, ever-present death, and modern day slavery. England 1901 - 1910 Rosie Wallace lives in the Black Country and is the eldest daughter of chainmakers, learning her trade at her mother's side. Pay for women is poor, and all the future holds for Rosie is working ten or twelve hours a day, hoping to marry Jack, the boy she loves, when she reaches fifteen and probably having more children than they can feed. Even working these long hours, starvation wages keep the chainmakers in abject poverty, while the chain masters reap the profit. Rosie wants better for her family. Hearing that in London, agitator and socialist, Mary Macarthur, is lobbying parliament to end sweated labour, Rosie writes to her, begging her help in their desperate plight, but can one person unite the women chainmakers of Hawley Heath to strike for a living wage and defeat their rich and powerful chain master, who refuses to pay the legal wage? Will Rosie's disastrous assignation with the chain master's son lose her Jack's love and throw a deadly spanner in the works? Can the white slaves of England defeat the chain master or will Rosie end her life on the gallows?A Victorian/Edwardian political social drama, The Chainmakers' Daughter exposes the living conditions of working-class women and girl's in the early 1900s. Mary Macarthur, a socialist and the first woman to stand for parliament, founded the Anti-Sweating League, the National Federation of Women Workers, and was instrumental in getting the 1910 Wage Board Act and a legal minimum wage into law. It was a fight that took many years and culminated in the women chainmakers' strike of 1910, a strike that lasted two months and captured immense public isupport. A family saga, this is the story of the fight of ordinary working women for a fair day's pay for a fair day's work that paved the pay for a national minimum wage and equality for women.'Rebecca Bryn's The Chainmakers' Daughter is not only the most vivid and haunting portrayal of the 20th century struggle for workers and women's rights but it is also timely and a mirror to our own modern struggles. Bryn's novel is to be lauded for its attention to historical detail and its sharp depiction of true and crippling poverty but it is first and foremost a love story. Rosie Wallace is a woman both out of time and very much in time. Bryn has managed to produce a heroine that is recognizable as a feminist to modern readers and yet not a unicorn to the early 1900s. The Chainmakers' Daughter is quite simply one of the most compelling and haunting works I have read in years. Characters, vices, and even steel comes alive under Bryn's fingers and the chain of love she creates is nothing short of miraculous.' - Rachael Wright, author of Captain Savva series.