The Dressmaker (Bainbridge novel) role. The Dressmaker (Bainbridge novel) The Dressmaker (US title The Secret Glass) is a gothic psychological novel written by Beryl Bainbridge. In 1973, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Like many of Bainbridge's earlier works, the novel is semi-autobiographical. In particular, the story was inspired by a relationship that she had with a soldier as a teenager. The characters of Nellie and Margo were based upon two of her paternal aunts. Set in Liverpool and Lancashire during World War II, a repressed dressmaker and her sister struggle looking after their 17-year-old niece, who is having a delusional affair with
The Dressmaker (Ham novel) to her house, takes her sewing machine, and leaves by train. By the time the performers return, the entire town has burned down. The novel probes the human emotions and behaviours and how hypocrisy, bigotry, prejudice, vanity and malice alter people's perspective and make unacceptable things acceptable and vice versa. In a review for the "Trinity College Foundation Studies" Literature paper "Steep Stairs Review Collected and Neglected Works", Neralie Hoadley notes how "[the novel] is gothic in the sense of being extreme in its depictions of events in the overstated manner associated with tragedy. Love is central to the intensity