Emmeline has been told nothing about sex and does not worry about being pregnant even after she is. It is a measure of how well Emmeline has been created that we believe she makes love without realizing what she is doing. tĮmmeline falls in love with her foreman, a married Irish immigrant whose kindness is the only warmth in a life of dawn-to-dark, six-days-a-week-labor. Her 19th-century New England is as hard a place for women to thrive as her 20th-century New York, as in Looking for Mr. Rossner is not sentimental about the past. The mill girls themselves are individualized against the thunderous roar of the machinery, the bleak cold of long winter, the black-and-white-and-gray canal-cut landscape of Lowell. Rossner's historical research is obviously well done but entirely incorporated in the emotions and responses and adventures of her people.

Sent to the mill in Lowell to save her familty from hunger she is the sacrifice the family makes to survive. Only because Emmeline is well drawn and because we identify with her determination to survive difficulties and save her family, we are able to accept a story that is archaic and sensational.Įmmeline is a fully realized character in her naivete, her courage, her failing piety, her stubborn will, her devotion to her mother and her desperate loneliness. We know people more clearly, understand motives and see how events ramify, as we seldom can in real life. Fictional truth is more shapely and more persuasive than reality. The weakest answer any novelist can ever give is that something was that way and therefore is so transcribed. Of course, claiming an origin in fact does not excuse plots that creak or circumstances that collide with unlikely bangs. The novel begins straightforwardly, 'This is the story of Emmeline Mosher, who, before her fourteenth birthday, was sent from her home on a farm in Maine to support her family working in a cotton mill in Massachusetts.

In a note, Rossner tells us that the story of Emmeline was told by a woman in Fayette, Maine, old enough to have been a child when Emmeline was an old woman. In Emmeline, Judith Rossner has taken on a plot of high improbable melodrama and come so close to making it believable that the part we cannot swallow scarcely bothers our enjoyment. She is the coauthor of a September 14, 1980

Emmeline by judith rossner