Lyddie

Paterson—née Katherine Womeldorf—was born to Presbyterian missionaries who were on assignment in Eastern China. When the conflict that would become World War II intensified, Paterson and her family fled to the United States, where they moved between Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina. Once in America, Paterson struggled with English, as her first language was Mandarin Chinese. After she learned to read and write English, however, Paterson fell in love with literature, studying it at King’s College in Tennessee before traveling to Japan as a missionary in her own right. After returning to the U.S., Paterson continued her religious work; indeed, Paterson’s first job as a professional writer involved creating Presbyterian informational pamphlets for middle-schoolers. It wasn’t until 1973, almost a decade later, that Paterson published her first young-adult novel, The Sign of the Chrysanthemum. In 1977, Paterson released Bridge to Terabithia, which won the Newbery Medal (the highest honor in children’s fiction). Paterson’s other work includes Lyddie and Jacob Have I Loved. Today, Paterson lives in Vermont with her husband, with whom she shares four children, seven grandchildren, and a dog named Pixie.  

There are several crucial historical events undergirding the plot of Lyddie. First, the rise of industrial production at the Lowell mills was a shaping event in American history. Although the mills were founded by Francis Cabot Lowell, who saw himself as a progressive reformer dedicated to increasing class mobility (especially among the young “mill girls” he hired), the harsh working conditions were nothing like the utopia Lowell advertised. Instead, the teenaged weavers were required to perform the “kiss of death” discussed in Lyddie, a thread-sucking maneuver that led to high rates of illness and injury. It is also important to note the tensions around legalized slavery in the narrative’s mid-century moment. On the one hand, abolitionism—led by formerly enslaved activists like Frederick Douglass alongside some (largely Quaker) white abolitionists—was gaining ground. But on the other hand, the increased presence of the Underground Railroad (by which enslaved people could escape to Canada) increased the demand for brutal bounty hunters, who would track enslaved people from state to state in return for exorbitant rewards from slaveholders. 

In addition to influences from her early life (namely religious literature and the Japanese and Chinese fiction she came into contact with as a missionary), Paterson has cited several works of children’s literature as formative. These books include work by Beatrix Potter, A. A. Milne (known for the Winnie the Pooh series), Louisa May Alcott (author of the beloved novel Little Women), and Rudyard Kipling, who is both famous for his adventure stories and infamous for his pro-colonialism poem “The White Man’s Burden.” Above all, Paterson notes that “all of my work is an attempt to write something that will touch a reader the way The Secret Garden affected me at eight.” Other middle-grade novels that explore the industrial revolution, textile mills, and the labor movement include Katherine Paterson’s novel Bread and Roses, Too and Counting on Grace by Elizabeth Winthrop.