Category Archives: Lydia Rees

Families

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As I looked around the table at Christmas dinner, and saw people who had not spoken to one another for years, I thought of how complicated families could be.

In Murder, Sweet Murder, I set the mystery against Lydia’s family, but Will Rees’s is no less difficult.

Lydia, estranged from her father and step-mother, left her family years ago. Her father is a wealthy Boston merchant engaged in the Triangle Trade. He owns a distillery that distills molasses into rum as well a fleet of ships that run slaves from Africa.

Lydia cannot accept her father’s profession and after some problems in her personal live, runs away. She lands at Zion, a Shaker community in Maine. In Murder, Sweet Murder I bring her back to Boston, and her family. She is no more tolerant of her father’s profession now than she was then.

Rees’s father was an abusive alcoholic who died by falling off a wagon in a drunken stupor. Rees is not an alcoholic but he makes other mistakes with his children. Before the action begins in A Simple Murder, David, Rees’s oldest son runs away from home, and takes refuge in Zion with the Shakers. Rees had left David (he would say his father abandoned him) with Caroline and her husband. When Rees returns home and recovers the farm, sending Caroline’s family packing, she never forgives him.

In A Devil’s Cold Dish, Caroline does her very best to destroy her brother and his family.

As the stories go on, and Rees’s history unfolds, his family expands. But it also changes. By the time of Murder, Sweet Murder, Jerusha, Rees’s oldest daughter, wants to leave home for school. David and Simon have already left for a farm in a distant town.

Families are complicated, even in fiction.

Gender in Will Rees’s America

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Several readers have expressed the opinion that Lydia should be the detective, not her husband. I can see their point. I think she is more intelligent than he is as well. But I chose Will Rees for some practical reasons.

Although women were not so circumscribed as they became later, in the Victorian times, they had little freedom. Everything they had, and I mean everything right up to their children and the clothes on their back, belonged to their husbands. The farm on which Rees and Lydia are living went to Lydia on the death of her first husband. She promised it to the Shaker community nearby. But when she married Rees, that farm became his property, leading to no end of issues with the Shaker community that expected to take possession.

And while we are on the subject of inheritance, it is important to realize that widows did not inherit from their husbands unless SPECIFICALLY MENTIONED BY NAME IN THE WILL. If they were not included, they became the responsibility of the eldest son and could be tossed in the street if he so desired.

Even their clothing was owned by their husband. I read one contemporary account of a woman who sought and obtained a divorce. She had to marry again in her petticoats.

Although there are accounts of women printers, silversmiths and more, most of them were the widows or daughters of the craftsmen who had taught them the skills. Only then could they actually work in these fields. No one would accept them as apprentices. (This has changed very slowly. I wanted to be a carpenter as a girl. The local trade school would not accept me because of my gender and told me to become a secretary.)

The other issue is travel. Rees is a traveling weaver; he goes from house to house and farm to farm to weave the yard spun during the previous winter. Even if Lydia owned a loom, she would be expected to weave at home. She would not have the freedom to leave that home, to investigate or for any other purpose, that her husband had.

Unfortunately, these were the challenges women faced. ( In many ways, they have not changed so greatly.) So Lydia has become a detective, but part of a team.