The Dressmaker (Ham novel)
Cover of first edition
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| Author | Rosalie Ham |
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| Country | Australia |
| Genre | Gothic fiction, romance |
| Publisher | Duffy & Snellgrove |
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Publication date
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January 1, 2000 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 296 pp (first edition) |
| ISBN | |
Special edition cover
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| Author | Rosalie Ham |
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| Country | Australia |
| Published | 2015 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 320 pp |
| ISBN | |
The Dressmaker is a Gothic novel written by the Australian author Rosalie Ham, and is Ham's debut novel. It was first published by Duffy & Snellgrove on January 1, 2000. The story is set in a 1950s fictional Australian country town, Dungatar, and explores love, hate and haute couture.
The novel is divided into four sections, each named after a different fabric and representing different phases in the story: gingham, shantung, felt and brocade. Since its release the novel has sold over 75,000 copies and has been translated into a number of languages including German and French.
A film adaptation of the book was released on October 29, 2015, with Kate Winslet as the protagonist Tilly Dunnage. A special film tie-in edition of the novel, featuring a new book cover with Winslet as the titular character, was released worldwide from August to October 2015. The tie-in-edition of the book sold 90,000 hard copies and 20,000 ebooks.
The novel is Rosalie Ham's first published novel, and was picked up for publication within a year after Ham finished writing it. She sent the manuscript to four publishers and received rejections but on one of the readers' advice she sent her manuscript to Duffy & Snellgrove, who picked it up for publication. According to Ham, the novel is a product of serendipity. In 1996, she enrolled in the writing programme of RMIT University but on her arrival she found that it was already full. As she was leaving, novelist Antoni Jach advised her to take a novel course instead. In novel-writing class, she got an assignment of "a 500-word synopsis of her book", which she recalled as "I had an idea and started writing it. Then you had to hand in 3,000 words, and then you had to hand in 10,000 words, and I had 30,000 words. It was only three weeks before I realised that this was the best 'accident' that had ever occurred to me."
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Wikipedia