“I wrote about one girl whose hair got caught in the machinery, and how the girls would develop lung problems because the mill’s windows were kept tightly closed. “For me, I just wanted to put them down on the page,” she said. “Talk about how women can get shafted when you make the victim the bad girl! That’s how, oftentimes, it happened.”īut O’Brien said her story is more focused on the life of a typical factory worker in the Mill City. “I read a lot of the testimony,” she said. O’Brien said that, based on her findings, she would still allege the Rev. It was a widely held belief back then that a Methodist minister murdered Cornell after they met in Lowell, though he was acquitted of her slaying in an 1833 trial. O’Brien said that from there, she researched the murder of Cornell to develop her story further. They seemed to be thirsty young women, and that always draws me to people.” And then they worked these incredible 12- to 13-hour days, but they still had the energy to write poems, stories and essays. “The industrialists were thriving, and (these women) were able to find independence and new lives beyond the farms.
“It was a time when everything was balanced beautifully,” O’Brien said. The mill girls in the 1840s would write their stories for the pamphlet after a long day’s work. She said her interest was piqued when she happened upon a replica of the factory workers’ monthly periodical, The Lowell Offering, in a Boston-area bookstore. O’Brien said the more she researched Lowell’s history, the more fascinated she became with the idea of writing a book based on its past. But after one too many accidents, Barrow is put in the position of emissary to address her fellow factory workers’ mounting list of grievances. The Daring Ladies of Lowell sets the stage for the spirited heroine, Alice Barrow, who leaves her farm to come to the city to work at a cotton mill. “I could almost hear them clattering up the stairs …,” she said, “taking their positions to work.” O’Brien said that’s where she got a sense of how the mill girls once lived. She said they went for a drive through the downtown’s cobbled streets and toured a few local museums. O’Brien, who lives in Washington, D.C., said she became enamored with Lowell when she visited the city for a day recently with a friend. The historical fiction centers on the life and times of mill girls in the early 1830s and is based in part on the 1832 murder of Sarah Cornell, a Lowell factory worker who was found strangled to death in Fall River. Somerville-born Patricia O’Brien, who writes under the pen name Kate Alcott, is releasing her latest book, titled The Daring Ladies of Lowell, on Feb. LOWELL - The Mill City has served as inspiration for writers going back to Charles Dickens’ time and beyond, and now a New York Times best-selling author has set her sights on Lowell for her new novel.
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