What Is *Clogs and Shawls* by Ann Chamberlin About?

Clogs and Shawls is Ann Chamberlin's oral immigrant family history of her Mormon grandmother, Frances Lyda, and Lyda's seven sisters—eight daughters raised in desperate poverty in Bradford, Yorkshire, in the early twentieth century. Chamberlin builds the book from interviews with her grandmother and six surviving great-aunts, weaving novelistic passages together with the women's own first-person narratives. If you want a personal-history account of working-class English life, Latter-day Saint conversion, and emigration to Salt Lake City, this is the book's subject and method.

Who the book follows

The eight sisters were the daughters of Mary Jane Jones and Ralph Robinson Whitaker, described in the source material as a remarkably gifted yet poor and blind piano tuner. Most of the girls had to leave school at age twelve and take work in terrible conditions at a local factory. Their mother converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1901 and became the backbone of the Mormon community in Yorkshire; her daughters followed her into the faith while finding their own, sometimes tragic, paths into adulthood, family, and life beyond industrial England.

Despite being exploited and undereducated, the sisters held a steadfast belief in a brighter future for the Mormon faithful—a mindset that, across their many differences, forged an unshakable togetherness among them. Many of the Whitaker sisters overcame long odds and incredible hardships to carry on and prosper in Salt Lake City.

How Chamberlin wrote it

The book's distinguishing feature is its mixed form. Chamberlin interviewed her grandmother and six of her surviving great-aunts—relatives who had made their way to Mormon Zion—and then wove novelistic passages together with their first-person narratives. The result is described as a singular work of oral immigrant family history that is both lively and enlightening.

That combination matters if you are choosing a family history to read: you get the intimacy and direct voice of recorded testimony alongside reconstructed scenes that give the social world shape.

What the book has won

Praise worth noting

Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander series, called The Merlin of St. Gilles' Well "wonderful" in the same source material, but the praise specific to Clogs and Shawls comes from Kerry William Bate, who described it as "rich and informative," adding that Chamberlin "gives the reader vivid insights into the social history of the time and place where these women lived while at the same time bringing them and their family members to life in such a way one can almost smell the blood and sweat."

Who it is for

• Readers of immigrant and working-class family history, especially oral histories built from interviews with living relatives.
• Readers interested in the social history of early twentieth-century Bradford and the Yorkshire Mormon community.
• Readers drawn to Latter-day Saint migration stories and the Whitaker sisters' eventual lives in Salt Lake City.
• Listeners: the audiobook edition, narrated by Jacqueline de Boer, won the 2020 Association of Mormon Letters award for Best Audiobook.