G J Griffiths

The Mule Spinners' Daughters G J Griffiths

"... Sebastian said: But there is an obstacle, a principle of hers that she's read of in a book by a woman called Mary Wollstonecraft...""... Women should be wives and companions to their husbands..."Did Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley, author of 'Frankenstein', fill the farm girl's head with too many ideas of feminism?When Sally Sefton runs away from Sebastian at the altar on her wedding day there is a desperate chase to find her. Some of her friends think they know why she ran. But only Cathy Priestley thinks she knows where. Her chief bridesmaid suspects Sally may have joined the Christian Israelites. Will they find her before the group sails on a missionary tour abroad? The split causes a bitter dispute between Sebastian and Wesley, her brother. While feelings are running so high there seems to be no hope of reconciliation between the families. Book one in the series, 'The Quarry Bank Runaways', tells the much earlier tale of their fathers when they journeyed on foot to Hackney workhouse in London. They were then boy apprentices who had escaped from the Cheshire cotton mill, desperate to find their destitute mothers. Book two, 'Mules; Masters & Mud', is about what happened to the apprentices during the Industrial Revolution, when they were qualified cotton mule spinners. Serious events, including the Peterloo Massacre, impinge upon the lives of Thomas Priestley and Joseph Sefton.