The role of QuiltHunter takes us on many authors’ adventures into the world of fabric, color, and design.  One of these authors is Jacqueline Winspear, creator of the post-Great War era psychologist and detective, Maisie Dobbs.

        Although every novel is a created world manipulated against the setting of a once-real world, Winspear has the ability to recreate the world of 1933 on many levels. Her character has overcome social, economic, educational, and personal obstacles to become an evolving amalgam of women of that period.  She starts as the thirteen-year-old motherless daughter of a London produce barrow man who first becomes a scullery maid in a rich caring household, where they discover and develop her intellect.  Her college career is interrupted by her service as a nurse both in besieged England and in France.  After the war, in which the love of her life is seriously disabled, Maisie returns to college and is mentored in detective work by a psychologist, Maurice, until she opens her own agency.  Her only spot of color is a blue silk dress which she wore when she first met her love. The image of that dress becomes a symbol of what her life could have been but probably won’t be.

Winspear’s ability to create an outward stimulus matching an inward inexpressible emotion is “spot on,” as the Brits say.  In an early novel Messenger of Truth, Maisie is researching death of an artist on brink of major revelation and success.  During her investigation she discovers that he has preserved a military greatcoat from the war, still muddy and bloods.  The sight so unnerves her that she buries “her head in the folds of rough wool, breathing in the musty smell that took her back to another time and place.” Just the feel of the old coat increases her resolve to find the killer at the same time it serves as a tug of memory for her and for us as readers.  We are relieved when she puts the coat back into the wardrobe, patting “the material one last time, acknowledging an essence caught in every thread, as if the fibers had absorbed every feeling, every sensation experienced by the owner in a time of war.” She has put her past behind her with this action.

 

As a woman of that age, Maisie prizes her hard-earned independence. She has just rejected a worthy man who has been courting her because she is afraid of losing her independence and becoming just a housewife.  To explain her action to herself, Maisie uses image of Icarus’s fatal flight too near the sun when its heat melted the wax on his wings and he plunged to his death because of his hubris.  The author also pinpoints Maisie’s conflicting emotions: “In spite of the sense of relief, she already felt the cool breeze of loneliness cross her heart.”

Maisie’s introspection parallels her fear of disrupting the social order in a male profession and suffered for it with loneliness.  Only her strength of training under her mentor lets her “ability to continue as she had begun, standing firmly on her own two feet.  Even though those same two feet had crumpled under her not so long ago.”

However, as her ability to ferret out the solutions to complicated crimes grows, so does Maisie’s mental health.  For example, when pressed to attend a fancy party, she thinks first of her treasured blue silk dress.  As a result of her new boldness, Maisie ventures out in black trousers and a long sleeveless blouse with a boat neckline and a matching sash at the hip at a time when trousers were just beginning to be acceptable.

        As she pursues her way to the truth about the artist’s death, “there were more threads for her to gather up and spin onto bobbins.  It was as if she were herself an artisan, standing before a giant loom with her skeins of wool, each one held ready to form part of the finished scene, the picture that would reveal the circumstances of Nick Bassington-Hope’s death.  All she had to do was to create the warp and then the weft, her shuttle flying in and out, up and down through the threads, laying her hands across the panel, her fingertips testing for tautness and give, the comb pushing the weft down to ensure close weaving without the hint of a space.”

        This is the sort of quote to make a critical analyst’s heart beat fast.  As such a person, I glory in unweaving what the author has woven to enjoy her skill to a higher degree.

        Maisie does indeed have many “threads to gather up and spin on bobbins.”  She used a case map, a large portable map of everything connect with the death, which she studies to find out connections between disparate items.  Often, such literary detectives use such a physical stimulus to visualize tenuous connections. In her “in Death” novels, J.R. Robbs’ heroine Eve Dallas does so in her homicide division.  Carrie on Homeland  uses one to uncover terrorists’ plots.  Mallory in Carol O’Connell’s novels is aggressively OCD about hers.  Maisie, like the others, sees and feels the heft of the threads in their metaphoric hands as the readers do.  We feel them reach out to capture the thread and to wind it around a bobbin in that age-old practice of spinners.

        The “giant loom,” of course, is the visualization of how the colored threads will be integrated into the final picture.  The warp and weft she contemplates are the crossing points – the picks, if you will, in weaving – of the “skeins of wool” which will flesh out the outline which the warp and weft have created.  Look how closely this resembles the process of writing – the gathering of facts, of colorful characters, of points of interest  -- the arrangement and rearrangements and repositioning of major items – the outline, first rough, then refining  -- the waiting for the picture/project to shake itself into a recognizable form just before the final adding of a finishing edge to the project.

        The sensual feel of the words are masterful.  “The shuttle flying” through the open shed, the combing of the weft so that it is tight, the “fingertips testing for tautness” – all serve to intensify Maisie’s experience and our delight in recognizing a familiar art and craft.

The author has Maisie realize that “she had come to love color, both in the landscape of character and quite literally—on fabric, canvas, clay or a room…There was a potency, a fire that made her feel as if she were cracking open her cocoon and waiting, waiting for her wings to dry before taking flight.”

As an on-going inspiration, Maisie refers to an earlier incident in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist: “’He could create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul’” and she wonders if she can do the same with her dull life.  She does.

The author provides Maisie’s growth through her series until, in the last published book, Elegy for Eddie, has the heroine somewhat at peace with herself and the person she has become.  We as readers are happy, if apprehensive, about her future.  The novel ends, as all good books should, with a sigh for the past and a nod to the future while the characters’ present is firmly situated in the hiatus between two great wars.

        “Then they sat back in silence, eating ice cream. Each with their own thoughts. Watching their world go by.”  Any novel that ends with two problematic lovers sitting in the spring sun eating ice cream cones has got to have its priorities right.