A literary story of sisters, art, women's work, and one woman's journey toward recognizing her own worth.
After a devastating betrayal, struggling artist Evie returns to Stella Mare, the small coastal community where she grew up. Her father has moved into assisted living, leaving Evie to sort through the family home and confront the memories it contains.
In the attic she discovers an old hooked rug and the diary of her great-aunt Hannah. What begins as a fascinating family discovery becomes an unexpected journey into the lives of the women who came before her.
As Evie pieces together their stories, she begins to see traditional women's domestic work in a new light. Sewing, rug hooking, cooking, and other forms of creative labor have often been dismissed as ordinary household tasks. Yet such work can also preserve history, express identity, communicate ideas, and provide women with a vital form of artistic expression.
At the same time, Evie's own life is changing. Her career as an artist is at a crossroads. Her sisters and family draw her back into the complicated world she thought she had left behind. And Stephen, a visiting university professor working at the local art gallery, offers the possibility of a new love-but Evie must first learn to distinguish love from the kind of relationship in which she has lost sight of herself.
Set against the richly drawn culture of Stella Mare, Domestic Arts is a layered work of literary women's fiction about sisters, family, creativity, women's history, and self-discovery.
It is a story of traditional women's work as art, the search for female identity and self-worth, career change, new beginnings, and the courage to recognize one's own value.
For readers of literary women's fiction, sisters fiction, women's history, feminist literature, domestic arts, women's art, and character-driven stories about women finding themselves.