Julia Kelly writes brilliant historical fiction. Her novels capture the essence of a bygone era, and “The Dressmakers of London,” her newest novel, brings wartime London to life through the eyes of two estranged sisters. Isabelle and Sylvia Shelton lost their father at a young age, and their mother was forced to work to ensure the family’s survival. She opened a dress shop and carefully eked out a living.
Sylvia escaped that life when a wealthy young doctor became enamored with her and married her, thus elevating her into higher social strata. After her marriage, she worked hard to hide her working-class beginnings, and that included leaving her family, her mother and sister, behind. Isabelle grew up in the flat over the dress shop and became immersed in the work at a young age. She loved sketching new ideas for designs, but her mother never approved of any of Izzie’s concepts.
When their mother dies, Sylvia and Izzie learn that they’ve both been left the dress shop. The reason given in the will is that it might be something that both girls will need. Izzie is furious as she’s the one who has been working and keeping the shop open for years, while her sister swanned off to be a society wife and never looked back. Sylvia has learned unsettling information about her husband, and while she plans on gifting her half of the shop to her sister, she has begun to regret her estrangement from her sibling.
It’s when Izzie is conscripted and must go to training and work for the war effort that she realizes she needs Sylvia’s help. She asks Sylvia to run the shop while she is gone, because otherwise, the shop will have to close. Sylvia knows nothing about dressmaking, but the shop’s longtime seamstress, Miss Reid, can handle that. Sylvia does know about the accounting and business facets of keeping the shop open, so she agrees to help. Little does she know that it will become a full-time endeavor.
Kelly’s writing amply displays her magnificent ability to use action and dialogue, and here she includes some correspondence, too, to parse out the characters of the two sisters. As the story unfolds, we feel that we really know them and feel for their plights. We come to understand why Sylvia left the family so quickly and so unapologetically. Izzie’s resentment of Sylvia, her hurt and her bewilderment, become clear and completely understandable. But erasing over a decade of hurt and lack of communication isn’t easy.
As Sylvia works to comprehend what is happening to her marriage, she also struggles to juggle working at the shop, hiding her work at the shop from her husband and friends, and maintaining her standing on the women’s committees she is on. Those committees had been important to her husband for the connections they enabled her to make to help his business and social standing. Izzie is struggling as well. She is far from the shop that has been her life, she is worried about Sylvia’s ability to keep it open, and she is worried about the restrictions that are being placed on clothing because of the war. But at the same time, she is making friends, learning about new abilities, and perhaps even falling in love.
“The Dressmakers of London” should come with a warning. You will become so immersed in the lives of the characters, their dilemmas, and their relationships, that you might just ignore the world around you as you keep reading to see how the sisters will ever come together again. And they do, but watching the journey is truly a lovely experience. Kelly has opened a door into the world of London in the 1940s and given us the opportunity to see how people lived during the war. We see the clash of social classes, the upper class prejudice against working women (but not men in business), and the snobbery of many who happened to be lucky in their birth families. Kelly demonstrates the fragility of life; how an unexpected death can wreak havoc on the surviving family. And because this is fiction, of course Kelly provides us with a happy ending for these two incredible women who finally are able to once again become family.
This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.