It is set in 1957 in a spinning mill in Alexandria, an industrial suburb of inner Sydney, and describes the lives of fifteen working-class women who work there for breadline wages.

As one of the few novels to give an accurate first-hand account of the lives of female industrial workers in the 1950s, it has continued to be studied.

The whistle blows grime is washed from faces, hair combed, lipstick applied and the workers emerge, women again, leaving the factory behind them, into the evening streets, flashing neon lights and the journey home to families and lovers.

Among them are Shirl, nineteen and four months pregnant; Dawnie, beautiful and fiercely chaste; Patty, singing in the dance halls; and Nell, an active Communist Party member.

Like Hewett's first full-length play This Old Man Comes Rolling Home, which was first drafted around the same time, the language is a "chorus of rich vernacular voices", alternating between 1950s Australian urban argot, descriptions of the struggle to survive, and wistful evocations of the place and the era.

Hardy issued Hewett a challenge for them both to write a novel in eight weeks for entry in the Mary Gilmour Literary Competition in 1958.

She wrote the book between jobs on her kitchen table during “the coldest Sydney winter on record", warming her hands over the gas stove to type, because she had run out of money and coal.

The judges (who included Alan Marshall and Stephen Murray-Smith)[5] stated the book was "by far the most successful novel of the militant labour movement that we have read".

[8] The novel "paints a convincing picture of those dreary inner suburbs of Sydney near the north west corner of Botany Bay, a locality which for many years signified a God-forsaken place of exile".

Stace's signature "Eternity" was picked up by the artist Martin Sharp and became a symbol of Sydney in the 2000 Olympic Games opening ceremony and Millennium celebrations.

A typical response in 1959 from the Townsville Cultural Group applauded the novel as a contribution to working-class literature: the surging vitality of the novel, the gripping picture it gives of parts of Sydney and some aspects of Sydney life, characterisation and the realistic nature of the dialogue.

[12] Sydney Baker from the Sydney Morning Herald was more balanced, agreeing the book presented "a vivid series of pictures of working women presented with wry humour and without sentiment" while decrying the "spurious ending", stating "If Miss Hewett had been able to resist the temptation to convert the stay-in strike at the end of her 'novel' into a banal outlet for communist propaganda, it would have been remarkably good.”[13] Once she left the Communist Party, Hewett felt "something close to revulsion" at the political content of the book.

The lack of a real protagonist among the book's many characters, each of whom appears in one or two chapters plus the finale, has led Bobbin Up to be called by Hewett and others "not a novel", but a cycle of short stories.

In 1979, Hewett cited her influences as Zola's Germinal and particularly Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, which adopted a similar format.

[4] Stephen Knight agreed, saying, "The characters coexist, like threads of a larger pattern, not being organised in tiers of importance".