You Should Read GILDED MOUNTAIN by Kate Manning
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Last month, while waiting at a bus stop in Windermere, my husband and I studied a route map and debated whether we should wait for the bus, which was obviously behind schedule, or walk to the train station instead. The weather was lovely, and the walk was only a mile. But we had four suitcases and two kids to consider, and now at the end of our two-week journey, I wasn’t sure I could convince our daughters to make the trek.
Correction/confession: I wasn’t sure I could listen to them complain about walking, uphill or down, for one more day.
A couple waiting near us overheard our conversation and, noticing our American accents, asked how we were enjoying our travels. The husband told us he loves the American west and that his wife loves “everything American.” She confirmed this and was delighted to find out we were from Colorado because she was reading a book set in our state.
The exchange reminded me of the way travel reframes your perception of yourself and your home. Me, have an accent? I wanted to say. No, no, you must be thinking of my relatives in Minnesota. And Colorado, the American west? According to the map, sure, but that’s not something I think about often.
I’ve never been to Marble, but here are some elk I saw in Estes Park, CO.
Historical fiction, like travel, pulls the same trick. Gilded Mountain by Kate Manning introduced me to an area and period of Colorado history that was completely new to me.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Marble, Colorado was nationally known for its marble quarries. According to History Colorado, stone from Marble “was used in hundreds of landmark buildings, structures and monuments throughout the nation, including the Lincoln Memorial, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the Washington Monument.” Sylvia Smith angered local business owners with her articles in the local paper, The Marble Booster, that decried their unfair practices.
Inspired by Smith and the events in Marble, Manning’s Gilded Mountain tells the story of Sylvie Pelletier, a young woman who finds herself in Moonstone, Colorado, when her father takes a job in the quarry mill. The novel is told from her point-of-view toward the end of her life as she reflects on the events that shaped her life. Because of the gap in time from when events occurred and when Sylvie is relating them, her narrative voice adds in tantalizing hints about the drama about to unfold. The novel opens with these delicious lines:
“I never told a soul about the money. Not a word about the marriage or the events that led me to his arms.”
More, please!
Reading Notes
Before we learn about the money or the marriage, though, we follow Sylvie as she makes her way in Moonstone. Although born in the US, Sylvie is culturally Quebecois, and speaking French makes her an outsider twice over when she arrives in Moonstone in 1907, two years after her father arrives “as a quarryman for the Padgett Fuel and Stone Company, digging out the world’s finest grade of pure white marble, good for carving into statues and bank pillars, monuments” (4). Sylvie and her family struggle through a harsh winter in the sparse one-room house provided by Padgett. Instead of being paid in money, the quarry workers earn credit to “spend” at the company store. Saving money or getting ahead is as impossible as staying warm. When Sylvie wins an essay contest and lands a job at The Moonstone City Record, she is excited not only to help her family, but also gain her independence from her conversative mother.
K.T. Redmond, the newspaper’s owner, provides a fiery role model. She styles her newspaper as “Liked by Many, Cussed by Some, Read by Everybody” (39). Under K.T.’s unorthodox tutelage, Sylvie begins reporting on injuries at the quarry. Despite the appeal of being a newspaperwoman, the prospect of five dollars a week lures her away to work at the Padgett family’s Moonstone mansion, known as Elkhorne Manor. Working Inge Padgett’s personal secretary introduces Sylvie to an entirely new way of living.
The Padgetts’ enormous house and lavish lifestyle mock the inhumane living conditions of the workers and their families in Quarrytown. The presence of John and Easter Grady, a formerly enslaved couple who work at Elkhorne, also complicate Sylvie’s worldview. While on the surface they appear to be employees like her, she learns their history within the Padgett family is much darker and imbalanced than she imagined.
When Inge heads back east, Sylvie returns to Moonstone Record and continues to write about Quarrytown hardships. The more she learns about the labor union movement led by the charismatic George Lonahan, the more she questions her relationship to the Padgetts, including her inescapable interest in Jasper Padgett, the charming heir.
Interspersed with Sylvie’s narrative are articles from Moonstone Record as well as its Padgett-funded competitor. In her Author’s Note, Mannings explains she “appropriated some newspaper articles, events, and certain biographical details” throughout the novel but altered them to fit her narrative. Letters swapped between characters also add a “real-life” flair to this fictional tale. Sylvie’s story did not end where I expected, and I eagerly read along to follow her journey and envision a Colorado that feels as foreign to me as Colorado might feel to my companion at the bus stop.
Back home, as I write this post, I could kick myself for not asking the woman from Liverpool which book she was reading set in Colorado. Maybe it was Gilded Mountain. I hope this book finds its way to her—and to you—some day.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2022
Length: 445 pages; audiobook runs 16 hours
Timeline: 1907 to 1934
Narrator: first-person POV of Sylvie
Pairs Well With: West with Giraffes (novel; here’s why you should read it); Eureka Mill (poetry collection); historic newspapers; champagne or whiskey to keep you warm
Book Club
The novel opens with our narrator, Sylvie, revealing the secrets she’s kept for her entire life: “I never told a soul about the money. Not a word about the marriage or the events that led me to his arms. In those days I was a young religieuse, my mother pointing me toward a nunnery. But it was the transformation of love and ease I wanted, and when we went west, I went looking” (3). After you learn about the money and the marriage, what do you make of Sylvie’s decision to keep them secret? How might her trajectory changed if she’d told the truth about one or the other? How might the secret have helped her in the end?
Inge Padgett’s side project is “la Department Sociologique,” which she claims is intended “to make not only profit” for the Padgett Company, but also “the healthy society” for Moonstone workers. Her tactics are problematic, however, when she focuses on beautifying the town rather than fulfilling people’s actual needs for survival. What do you think about her approach to social welfare? What connections do you see in America today?
Close Reading
During her time working for K.T. Redmond, Sylvie still makes time for her family. She accompanies her brother to school one fall day:
“The air grew chilly with autumn. The aspens turned, brilliant slashes of yellow on the mountainsides. Their leaves shimmered in the wind with a sound like water rushing. In the gusts they rattled, shattering into bright smithereens, showers of gold coins streaming through the blue and marvelous air.”
The word “slashes” brings to mind a painter adding the final touches to a canvas. In Manning’s sentence, though, the aspens are in charge here. Nature isn’t waiting to be painted; it’s active, as the aspens “turn” themselves to create the “brilliant slashes.”
In the next sentence, the trees’ movement, and the sound of their leaves rubbing together, takes on the power of a “rushing” river. While earlier Manning only used a word (“slashes”) that connoted comparison, here she explicitly uses a simile to compare the trees to water. Although powerful, water can also be soft and yielding, as is paint.
But in the next sentence, Manning reminds us that the natural beauty of Moonstone is being corrupted by human greed: The leaves harden into “gold coins” as they “shatter” in the air. The air may still be “blue and marvelous,” but words like “rattled” and “shattering” suggest brokenness, suggesting that the idyllic scene cannot last.
Creative Writing
Fiction: Sylvie yearns for Jasper Padgett: “The conifers creaked in the cold wind. A dervish of marble dust whirled in an eddy of brown leaves. My guts twisted with longing, not for buttered larks or riches but for a name I would not say aloud” (182). Use the last sentence as your starting point: “My guts twisted with longing, not for ___ or ___ but for a ___.”
This sentence structure is effective because each blank offers us a specific clue to the character’s motivations: the first two blanks reveal dislikes, while the final bank reveals a desire. By listing the dislikes first, you can first give us a sense of what the character perceives they should like or want. This can tell us quite a bit about their background or surroundings. By placing the desire at the end of the sentence, you create suspense for the reader and string them along until they land on that final word like solving a mystery, a mystery which, of course, will make them want to keep reading! Once you’ve got your “not this, but that” formula set up, keep writing for a paragraph or two to see where it goes. You could also easily change this to a third-person POV.
Nonfiction: Closing out her recollections, Sylvie notes, “Perhaps this wish [to preserve memories in writing] is the same one that builds a monument in marble or casts a statue in bronze, carves initials in a rock. But that’s not what I’m after. Not the stone glory of important or self-important men. Only to tell it how it was: The wind groaned in the eaves. The cold froze the very marrow. The lights of the village winkled in the dark, the towers of Elkhorne spired above the pines” (445). Sylvie creates a spectrum between monuments and memories. Where do you land on this spectrum? What motivates you to write?
Sentence Study
After getting roped into Jasper Padgett’s plan, Sylvie uses her ill-gotten gains to support a fund for striking workers. At first she feels like Robin Hood. Then, Sylvie tells us:
“But happiness is short-lived for a thief as it is a for grief-stricken girl.”
This sentence could be a line in a poem! I almost hear iambic pentameter when I read it aloud, adding a line break after “thief.” That pesky, dactylic “happiness” screws up my scansion because it stresses “hap” before following with two unstressed syllables. Still, the effect this sentence creates for me is one of musical balance. The second half of the sentence, from “as” to “girl” is a single syllabus short of the ten in the first half. However, the rhyme of “thief” and “grief” connects the halves (or lines, if you will indulge my poetry fantasy). I also love the use of a hyphenated adjective in each half: “short-lived” and “grief-stricken.” The short “i” carries from “lived” to “stricken” in a satisfying way.
