Jo Baaker, a textiles historian and Dutch ex-pat is drawn back to the island where she was born to investigate the provenance of a 17th-century silk dress. Retrieved by local divers from a sunken shipwreck, the dress offers tantalising clues about the way people lived and died during Holland’s famous Golden Age.
Jo’s research leads her to Anna Tesseltje, a poor Amsterdam laundress turned ladies’ companion who served the enigmatic artist Catharina van Shurman. The two women were said to share a powerful bond, so why did Anna abandon Catharina at the height of her misfortune?
Jo is convinced the truth lies hidden between the folds of this extraordinary dress. But as she delves deeper into Anna’s history, troubling details about her own past begin to emerge.
On the small Dutch island of Texel where fortunes are lost and secrets lie buried for centuries, Jo will finally discover the truth about herself and the woman who wore the Winter Dress.
Lauren Chater is quickly making a name for herself as one of Australia’s leading historical fiction novelists. Her previous novels The Lace Weaver and Gulliver’s Wife were both popular with BR readers, making our Top 100 list in 2020 and 2021 respectively. Her novels tend to resurrect women’s stories from the lost pages of history, placing them front and centre for all to enjoy.
For her latest novel, Chater took inspiration from a collection of 17th-century artefacts discovered off the coast of Texel, a small island in the North Holland in 2014. Among the artefacts was an unusually well-preserved silk dress which, Chater states in the author’s notes, has been identified as “one of the most significant and exciting discoveries in textiles history.” In The Winter Dress, Chater cleverly takes this real-life wreckage and transforms it into a sweeping and captivating tale of love, loss and discovery that centres around two women, separated by centuries but connected by one beautiful silk dress.
The novel follows dual timelines: textiles historian Jo Baaker in the present day and Anna Tesseltje in Amsterdam, 1651. Both women make for captivating protagonists who have each similarly suffered the loss of their parents. Chater seamlessly shifts between both timelines, bringing both to life with meticulous research, vivid imagery and gorgeous prose.
With The Winter Dress, Chater has delivered a beautifully told story that takes an intriguing historical mystery and weaves it into a richly imagined tale that is every bit as breathtaking and beguiling as the remarkable dress it is based on.
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