The young heroine, a Victorian gentlewoman from a well-to-do Welsh family, like Dillwyn herself, runs off to London where she disguises herself as a maid. She falls in love with her Mistress, who doesn't know here true identity and sees her as a social inferior.
Archive.org has a (poorly formatted and partially unreadable) version that you can skim if you are interested, or you can get the proper book at the link above if you are interested.
Like many such stories, it falls shorts in the wider lady-to-maid context as this is not the author's main focus unfortunately (as a side note, words "uniform" or "apron" are not even mentioned once so that should tell you something), but it does offer a number of interesting observations that I found quite interesting.
For example, Jill lies about her age to appear more experienced (saying she's 24 instead of 19), fakes reference letters and takes hairdressing classes so that she can find herself a good place. Of course, none of these should surprise anyone who know anything about Victorian maids or read In Cap and Apron, not to mention Her Most Remarkable Performance!
They language is rough in this. It feels like someone needed to run it through a spell checker.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing either way.
You mean the Archive version? Yeah, it's a bit rough, but readable to a degree. There are really not that many period books that touch on the topic at any length so I seize any opportunity to shout to the world when I discover a new one!
DeleteThe garbled text is the result of an OCR program misreading letters from a scanned copy of the book. The text is perfectly legible if you look at the pictures themselves. Search Google Books for Jill Amy Dillwyn and it'll come up in it's entirety.
ReplyDeletehttps://books.google.com/
There are two volumes, by the way.
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