A little sibling nobody wants, least of all Ruth, who nonetheless grudgingly sets to work on making baby clothes and blankets while Ma languishes ill in bed and Pa smokes and drinks and paints badly. Until disaster strikes and Ma falls pregnant with a little sibling for Ruth. Tweenage Ruth has thus grown up around needlework and has started to show a talent for it herself that bodes somewhat better for the family's future. She takes in work from a nearby shop from whom she has to purchase the raw materials, and then proceed on trust that the shop owner will buy back the finished work for a fair price. As Ruth (portrayed in the audio version with wonderful prickliness by Jayne Entwhistle) begins the story, their little family is living shabbily on what little Ruth's mother can earn by sewing and embroidering in the gig economy of Victorian England - making beautiful things or parts of beautiful things for fashionable ladies who obeyed their parents to wear. Ruth's mother, of course, disobeyed her family and married the artist and was punished with ostracism and poverty for it. I'll start with the more obviously sympathetic of the novel's two heroines, Ruth, born to a beautiful daughter of the landed gentry and a rather feckless artist.
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