Meet the Author
About this event
Marianne Fons’ homage to The Scarlet Letter places talented seamstress Hester Prudhomme in Methodist Iowa instead of 1700s Puritan Boston. Twentieth-century Hester steps off a Trailways bus on a summer day in 1956, a wedding band on her finger but no husband in sight. She snags a job at the town’s best dress shop, and at church on Sunday her beauty captivates Arthur Hightower, First Methodist’s unmarried junior pastor, leading to a passionate encounter in City Park.
Months later, Hester’s estranged husband Roger arrives in town looking for his wife. He finally spots her one day on the post office steps, an infant he knows is not his in her arms. Enraged, he confronts her, and vows to find the man who has wronged him.
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With the help of chain-smoking dress shop owner June Moore, Hester raises her daughter Pearl on her own, becoming the sought-after dressmaker of wealthy fashionistas in Des Moines. Marianne Fons is known to millions of quilters as the former co-host of “Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting” nationwide on Public TV. She co-authored Quilter’s Complete Guide, one of the most popular quilting books of all time, and taught and lectured about quilts coast to coast for twenty years.
Her debut novel, The Dressmaker of Winterset, an homage to The Scarlet Letter , set in Winterset, Iowa, in the 1950s, will be released by Union Square & Company in early March 2027. In her small town of Winterset, IA (pop. 5,375), Marianne helped found the Iowa Quilt Museum in 2016 and spearheaded the renovation of the Iowa Theater in 2017.
In 2022, she was named Madison County Citizen of the Year. Her Substack column, “Reporting from Quiltropolis,” offers slice-of-small-town-life snapshots of quilty goings-on in Winterset and beyond. Beaverdale Books will have copies of the book available for sale and signing.
Description from Beaverdale Books.
Registration, tickets, accessibility and last-minute changes are handled by the organizer. Confirm details before you go.
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