The central character in Tracy Chevalier's new novel is a Quaker girl newly arrived from Dorset in pre-civil war Ohio. Jilted and broken-hearted, Honor Bright has rashly decided to accompany her sister Grace, who is off to marry her fiance in America. Finding herself alone in a strange land after Grace dies of yellow fever on the journey, Honor first takes lodging in a milliner's shop belonging to the ailing and hard-drinking Belle Mills, a tough but kindly woman who is heavily involved with the Underground Railroad, a network of safe houses and food depots that helps runaway slaves make their way to Canada and freedom.

From here, Honor moves on to live in a Quaker settlement near Oberlin with Grace's fiance and his widowed sister-in-law, Abigail. Here she feels like an outsider. Everything in Ohio seems transient, people fleeing north and heading west as pioneers. Everything is compared to Dorset and found wanting: the trees crowd in on her, the weather is extreme, the food tedious.

Chevalier immerses herself in period and place, and a wealth of domestic detail is deftly conveyed. Her research, as always, is meticulous and lightly worn. The Quakers are quilters, and much time is given to describing their traditional art. Honor finds the American style brash and simplistic; the other women don't take to the more subtle English techniques she uses. Herein lies the problem. Honor can't adjust, but can't face the journey back, and things don't improve when she marries Jack Haymaker, a young farmer she hardly knows, and moves in with him and his unfriendly mother and sister.

A huge moral dilemma arises when Honor becomes involved with the Underground Railroad. The Fugitive Slave Act has been passed: it is illegal to assist a runaway slave, and there are heavy penalties. The Quakers believe in equality but also want to abide by the law. In helping slaves, Honor puts her law-abiding new family at risk, and the problem is compounded by the fact that Belle Mills's disreputable brother Donovan has taken a fancy to her. Donovan is a slave-catcher, relentlessly hunting down runaways and returning them to their masters, but he is craggily attractive and Honor believes she can sense "the light" in him. This seems to have more to do with animal magnetism than idealism, as Honor singularly fails to extend such Christian tolerance to her new family. In tones of self-righteous condescension, she constantly denigrates the women around her while playing up her own superiority.

Abigail is no domestic goddess. Her kitchen is a mess, Honor writes to her friend back home, and "when she quilts she prefers to stitch in the ditch, hiding her poor stitches in the seams between the blocks. I do not think thee or I has resorted to such a technique since we were girls!" Her own quilting is, of course, faultless, and the constant implication is that these pioneer women are all jealous of her skill and refinement. "My hands are small and my arms are not strong," she complains as she struggles with the milking alongside mother-in-law Judith and sister-in-law Dorcas, whose forearms, she declares, are "as thick as fence posts!"

A tendency to cast herself as martyr undermines the reader's sympathy for Honor. In spite of her dedication to the Underground Railroad and undoubted bravery in placing her principles before practicality, Honor is priggish and mean-spirited. Nothing wrong with a flawed protagonist, of course, but I got the impression that we are meant to take her side against the others. In fact, the minor characters were often more interesting, in particular Belle Mills and Judith Haymaker, a woman whose past traumas have left her with a troublingly compromised moral compass. As for the men, Donovan, despicable but possibly redeemable, ends up tipping into stereotype, while Jack Haymaker is one-dimensional.

The Last Runaway is an entertaining read. The important themes of the book  slavery and the resistance movement  are, in spite of some moving encounters, unfortunately far less developed than the Quakers and quilting angle. As a period piece on Ohio life in the 1850s it is admirable, but Tracy Chevalier has written far better books than this.

 Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie is published by Canongate.