Lyddie was published by Lodestar Books (an imprint of Dutton) in 1991. It is Paterson’s most directly historical novel and her most politically engaged — a story about labor, capital, female independence, and the choices that working-class women faced in early industrial America.
Lyddie Worthen is thirteen when her mother abandons the family’s Vermont farm, and she is hired out as a servant at a tavern. Determined to earn enough money to reclaim the farm, she travels to Lowell, Massachusetts, to work in the textile mills — where factory girls can earn real wages, more than they could in any other employment available to women in the 1840s.
The mills are simultaneously liberating and destructive: Lyddie earns money, gains independence, discovers reading (Oliver Twist becomes her talisman), and finds community among the other mill girls. But the work is brutal — fourteen-hour days, dangerous machinery, cotton dust that destroys lungs, and constant speed-ups that require workers to tend more looms for the same pay. When some girls begin organizing for better conditions (the historical Lowell mill girls’ petitions and labor actions), Lyddie must choose between her personal goal (paying off the farm debt) and collective action (risking her job for everyone’s benefit).
Paterson refuses to simplify this choice: Lyddie’s individualism is not selfishness but survival, and the novel honors both her determination and the organizers’ courage without pretending that the correct choice is obvious.
Collecting Lyddie
First edition (Lodestar Books / Dutton, New York, 1991): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Signed first edition: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $5–$12