Lily Queen

Lily Queen is a novel that starts from one of the worst workplace disasters in American history. Robert Hardaway follows a pretty young factory worker who survives the 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City. What she does with her second chance is the real story.

The description tells us she eventually climbs New York's social ladder and wins wealth and fame. That arc, from a crowded sewing floor to the top of a city's society, gives the book its pull. The catalogue subjects point to the same ground: Fire, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, New York fiction and historical fiction.

We hold no table of contents and can't promise chapter headings, so we won't invent any. What we can say is that this is fiction built on a real fire, published in 2006 by Western Reflections Publishing Co., and it runs 272 pages. If you've read about the Triangle fire in history class and wondered about the people who walked away from it, this novel imagines one of them.

Readers of historical fiction who like a rags to riches arc will find the clearest match here. It also suits anyone who has studied the Triangle fire and wants a human story set beside the history, and book clubs that enjoy talking about class and reinvention in early twentieth century New York. Because the book is a novel, it won't replace a labor history of the fire itself. If you want that, pair it with a nonfiction account and read the two against each other.

Robert Hardaway teaches law at the University of Denver, and his university profile says his recent writing includes law-related fiction and novels. Lily Queen is one of four books he has with Western Reflections, published between 2003 and 2010. We don't have interviews or notes from him about how this story came together, so we leave that to the book. His author page lists the rest.

More about Robert Hardaway →

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire broke out at about 4:40 in the afternoon on Saturday, March 25, 1911, in the Asch Building at Washington Place and Greene Street in Manhattan. The Triangle Waist Company occupied the eighth, ninth and tenth floors. According to Wikipedia, 146 garment workers died, 123 of them women and girls, and 78 people were injured.

Exit doors were locked, a common practice meant to deter theft and unauthorized breaks. The Greene Street stairway was blocked by flames, the Washington Place door was locked, the building had no sprinklers, and the single fire escape collapsed. Owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were tried for manslaughter in December 1911 and acquitted, and a 1913 civil suit found them liable, with $75 awarded per victim.

The disaster led New York to form the Factory Investigating Commission, chaired by Robert F. Wagner and co-chaired by Al Smith, and a run of new fire safety and labor laws followed.

Source: Wikipedia, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire