Dolores Dick

Miles to Dundee Dolores Dick

This historical novel about three fictitious, Victorian-Era women has as its setting the location of one of the most shocking and unpredicted events of the nineteenth century - the partial collapse of the world's longest railway-bridge, the River Tay Bridge of Dundee, Scotland (perceived, like the Titanic, to be indestructible).

All three of these women's lives come to be significantly altered by that December 28, 1879 mishap which resulted in the drowning of an entire train of travelers - each woman an actual or would-be passenger, or acquainted with one or more (fictional) passengers, on that train.

The first heroine is a thirty-year-old widow dealing with an unexpected pregnancy and its aftermath. The second and third are younger women, one extremely attractive, the other equally unattractive. The former is found pursuing alternatives to an unwanted, arranged marriage, the latter, victim of a series of unfortunate events due to her lack of "beauty capital".

In the course of telling the women's stories, this merged-trilogy, romance novel addresses issues such as social class and women's rights in nineteenth-century Scotland; ways that physical attributes potentially affect women's lives; female strength and perseverance; and Quaker perspectives and practices.

In the end, each woman "gets her man".