Why a seamstress? Her mother has been training her since she was a child.

She’s heard about the sailing of a new unsinkable ship called Titanic and is wild to board it and sail to America where she hopes to make a new life for herself as a seamstress.

Tess has been working as a maid in France. It sets the tone for the beginning of the story. The cover of this novel with its period dress, draws the eye to the richness of the material. She has spent countless hours researching everything she could get her hands on about the sinking of the Titanic. Kate Alcott is the pen name of a journalist named Patricia O’Brien. I have watched this film many times over and still stay riveted to my seat. This epic film was shot in black and white in the fifties.

( From the publisher.I became a fan forever of all things Titanic many years ago while watching A Night To Remember with my mother and grandmother. Set against a historical tragedy but told from a completely fresh angle, The Dressmaker is an atmospheric delight filled with all the period's glitz and glamour, all the raw feelings of a national tragedy and all the contradictory emotions of young love. On dry land, rumors about the survivors begin to circulate, and Lady Duff Gordon quickly becomes the subject of media scorn and later, the hearings on the Titanic. Others-including the gallant Midwestern tycoon-are not so lucky. Tess’s sailor also manages to survive unharmed, witness to Lady Duff Gordon’s questionable actions during the tragedy. But on the fourth night, disaster strikes.Īmidst the chaos and desperate urging of two very different suitors, Tess is one of the last people allowed on a lifeboat. Once on board, Tess catches the eye of two men, one a roughly-hewn but kind sailor and the other an enigmatic Chicago millionaire. Tess, an aspiring seamstress, thinks she's had an incredibly lucky break when she is hired by famous designer Lady Lucile Duff Gordon to be a personal maid on the Titanic's doomed voyage. A vivid, romantic, and relentlessly compelling historical novel about a spirited young woman who survives the Titanic disaster only to find herself embroiled in the media frenzy left in the wake of the tragedy.

The Dressmaker by Kate Alcott