Daisy Chain de Maggie Ritchie

Spanning the period of dramatic change from 1909 to 1929, Daisy Chain was inspired by the eventful lives of the artists known as the Glasgow Girls. Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s wife Margaret Macdonald was one of these pioneering women artists and designers who carved out a place in the male-dominated art world to create the distinc- tive Glasgow Style. These women – students or teachers at Glasgow School of Art – were recognised in their day but fell into neglect until they were rediscovered in the first retrospective exhibition of their work in 2000, when they were named Glasgow Girls as a counterpoint to the earlier Glasgow Boys.

The turn of the century was a time of opening opportunities for women. Most of the Glasgow Girls studied under the innovative Francis Newbery, who led the way in education reform and provided equal opportunities for women. In his time as director, 50 per cent of the students at Glasgow School of Art were female.

One Glasgow Girl in particular inspired this novel: Eleanor Allen Moore, who emigrated to Shanghai in the roaring 1920s when the ‘Paris of the East’ was a glamorous, wicked boom town. Her adventurous life was the model for my heroine, who, like the real artist, attended Glasgow School of Art and moved to Shanghai with her husband, a doctor, and their daughter. Despite the many social changes taking place during this turbulent period, Shanghai and Glasgow had much in common as industrial boom cities that thrived on the shocking disparity between the privileged wealthy few and the desperately poor masses.

To research the novel, I was granted a Society of Authors grant to travel in Eleanor’s footsteps, tracing her 6,000-mile journey from Scotland to China and exploring the historic parts of Shanghai to get a feel for her life. Walking the same streets of Shanghai as Eleanor, and experiencing the same sights, smells and sounds, gave me a unique insight into the rich, colourful life of this intrepid woman.