Carol M. Cram is the author of several award-winning novels inspired by art and history, including The Muse of Fire, The Towers of Tuscany, and A Woman of Note, and host of The Art In Fiction Podcast, where she interviews authors who write novels inspired by the arts. In her spare time (!!) Carol also runs Artsy Traveler, a travel blog dedicated to thoughtful, arts-inspired travel.
Carol’s new novel The Choir is a terrific read that I highly recommend (my review is at the end of this post). Over to you, Carol.
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One of my motivations for writing The Choir was to shine a spotlight on the lives of working-class women in late Victorian England. So much historical fiction unfolds in grand country houses, among titled families, glittering ballrooms, and upper-class angst. These stories may be compelling, but they represent only a tiny fraction of the people who lived, worked, and died during the period.
In the 1890s, when The Choir is set, the overwhelming majority of people in Britain were working class. In the industrial regions of the North and Midlands, factory workers, domestic servants, miners, shop assistants, railway labourers, and mill hands formed the backbone of the nation. Their wages fed families in cramped terraces and squalid back-to-backs. Their lives, though rarely recorded in detail, shaped modern Britain.
And yet, historically, their stories have often been sidelined.
I wanted to write about the women who came before me: the mothers, aunts, and friends my grandmother (born in 1906) spoke about with both fondness and frustration. These were women who counted every penny, whose wombs were stretched by near-constant childbirth, and whose hands were roughened by factory work and harsh lye soap.
And yet these women must also have had dreams.
On frigid mornings, as they lit coal fires and faced another long day of toil, they may occasionally have allowed themselves to imagine lives very different from the ones they had been born into.
The Spark: A Family Mystery
My inspiration for The Choir began not with a history book, but with a family story.
As a child, I heard about my great-great-grandmother, who was apparently a force to be reckoned with. She had six children with one man, left him, and began a new life with another man, with whom she had seven more children.
I found myself asking: How did she manage to leave her first husband?
Abandoning a marriage in the 1890s was not simply emotionally difficult. It was economically and socially perilous, especially for a working-class woman. There were no safety nets, no independent income, and no easy legal recourse.
My grandmother had a beautiful singing voice, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine that her grandmother might also have sung. My research also uncovered the extraordinary popularity of music competitions in late Victorian England.
Those two seeds became the inspiration for my dual stories of Eliza Kingwell and her childhood friend, Ruth Henton.
Writing Beyond the Stately Home
In writing about the working classes, I quickly discovered how uneven the historical record can be. The wealthy left behind letters, diaries, portraits, and estate records. Working people left census entries, parish registers, and occasionally newspaper reports, often in connection with accidents, crimes, or scandals.
To reconstruct daily life, I turned to social histories, museum archives, and visits to preserved industrial buildings and workers’ housing. I stood in cramped kitchens where entire families once lived, cooked, and slept. I listened to the deafening roar of restored textile machinery and tried to imagine enduring it for twelve-hour shifts.
What struck me most was not only the hardship, but the vibrancy of community life.
In industrial towns, culture flourished alongside labour. Choral societies, brass bands, church groups, mutual aid societies, and lecture series created networks of belonging. Music, in particular, exploded in popularity during the second half of the nineteenth century. By the 1890s, competitive music festivals were drawing participants from across the North and Midlands, and musical education had expanded dramatically. Music was no longer an elite pastime. It was communal, aspirational, and accessible.
The industrial North was not culturally barren.
It was humming.
Ordinary Does Not Mean Small
One of the dangers in writing about working-class lives is the temptation to portray them as purely tragic. Certainly, poverty, overcrowding, dangerous labour conditions, and limited opportunity shaped daily existence. But working people also loved, argued, laughed, worshipped, and created.
In The Choir, Eliza’s life is constrained by financial strain and an unhappy marriage. Her home is cramped. Her choices are limited. Yet when she joins a local choir, something shifts.
Singing in the choir does not magically erase her circumstances. What it offers is something subtler and more powerful: a space in which she is valued for her voice.
For many working-class women, public singing in a choir would have been one of the few socially acceptable ways to step into visibility. It required discipline, cooperation, and courage. It demanded that women listen to one another.
Why These Stories Matter
Today, when we read about industrialization, we often encounter statistics: production output, export figures, urban growth. But behind every number was a person:
- A little girl like my great-grandmother (Bessie in the novel), leaving school at eleven to work in a mill.
- A mother going without her dinner so she can stretch a meat pie to feed five children and a sullen husband.
- A pregnant teen forced into a bad marriage because the alternative was unthinkable.
For me, writing The Choir was an act of reclamation. It was a way of honoring the women in my own family and the countless unnamed women who carried similar burdens. It was also a reminder that history is not shaped only in Parliament or palaces. It is shaped in kitchens, factories, and church halls.
When we write about working-class lives, we are not narrowing the scope of history.
We are widening it
The Choir by Carol M. Cram
Set in 1890s Yorkshire, The Choir tells the story of two women from working-class backgrounds whose lives diverge dramatically, until music brings them together again. Against the backdrop of industrial England’s musical boom, the novel explores resilience, reinvention, and the transformative power of the collective voice.
The Choir follows Eliza Kingwell, a struggling mother who turns to a local singing competition as a last hope after tragedy shatters her plan to escape a loveless marriage. She forms a choir of spirited working-class women, aiming to win the life-changing prize money.
Meanwhile, her former friend Ruth Henton, now a disgraced London star, returns to the North as a judge in the same contest. As rehearsals unfold, old wounds resurface, bonds grow, and secrets emerge. At its heart, the story celebrates resilience, sisterhood, and the power of women’s voices.
My review:
The Choir is one of those novels that captivates from the very beginning when the reader is introduced to the lives of two women, Eliza Kingwell and Ruth Henton who were once close friends but whose lives diverged when they were still young. Eliza is now married to a man who treats her badly and dominates every aspect of their lives. She has a plan to secure a better life for her five daughters, however, those plans are dashed when her husband discovers the money she has hidden away.
Ruth left the poverty of the North and became a singing sensation on the London stage. When her career falls apart, Ruth returns to her roots and becomes a judge for singing competitions. As fortune would have it, Ruth judges a competition where Eliza is the leader of the Briartown choir.
Great pacing, strong characters, and the ability to transport the reader in time and place made this novel stand out for me. Additionally, the author deftly handles the two narrators such that the story comes together in a fulfilling and balanced way. As Carol Cram says: ordinary lives do not mean small lives.
Highly recommended.
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M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel THAT WAS THEN is a contemporary thriller. Mary’s other novels, THE ADMIRAL’S WIFE, PARIS IN RUINS, TIME AND REGRET, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook or on her website www.mktod.com.
2 Responses
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great post!