Here’s an interesting and fairly little-known novel that was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults.
Book: Nell’s Quilt, Susan Terris, 1996.
This book always left me feeling distinctly unsettled when I read it as a teenager and for that reason it wasn’t exactly on my favourites list. It’s a weird hybrid of a historical fiction novel about a girl chafing against societal expectations, and a novel about anorexia. There’s quite a bit of scholarly work done on the topic of girls and women in the Victorian era starving themselves, but it’s more closely related to theories on control and power dynamics than to body image. I do realize that modern anorexia is also very closely related to those things, but the body image thing is significantly a greater factor than in the Victorian period. Let’s dive in.
Nell is eighteen, and her parents have just informed her that her father’s second cousin Anson Tanner has proposed to her. Nell is staunchly opposed to this—she would rather move to Boston and “help people” as her grandmother did, who was a campaigner for women’s rights. Her mother points out gently that her grandmother’s money is gone and she can’t afford to do so, and her younger sister Eliza says that if she marries Anson the whole family will do much better. “I could not believe my ears. Was this truly 1899, only ten months shy of the beginning of the twentieth century? Or had I been catapulted back into the Middle Ages?” Okay, while I understand what they’re driving at here, 1899 wasn’t exactly the modern era we know and love today. Nell’s total shock at this announcement is a little out of place.
Young Adult Historical Vault 