I found the style irritating from the very first pages, studded with frequent italics and exclamation points to suit the melodramatic tone. Here's a paragraph of it from the prologue:
Ellen Gowan would not cringe and cry in the dark. She would be warm for she had earned the money so to be. Let there be fire! Let there be candles, not one but several!
That strident tone is kept throughout. After the prologue we see Ellen, the dressmaker of the title, as a girl on her thirteenth birthday in 1843. Her family is ruined! Ruined! When another teenage boy kisses her in public. And then--it's God's judgment for her sin in allowing it--the church falls down killing her father the vicar at the altar. Because of an earthquake. In England. I searched online and apparently there is a history of small quakes in Britain, but in all of it's recorded history there have only been a total of 12 deaths from them in the entire island. Afterward Ellen's mother is so prostrate with grief she doesn't speak for days. That's only about 75 pages in.
Really, the overwrought plot and writing was hard to take, and I only persisted reading because the author was on a list of recommended writers for historical fiction. I was disappointed that so little of the book was devoted to her rise as a modiste, and the world of Victorian fashion, and her success due more to luck than business acumen. I found this in the end a rather mediocre soap opera and treacly romance.
