{"id":4836,"date":"2023-03-16T06:16:32","date_gmt":"2023-03-16T13:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4836"},"modified":"2023-03-16T06:16:32","modified_gmt":"2023-03-16T13:16:32","slug":"jacqueline-winspear-the-white-lady","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/jacqueline-winspear-the-white-lady\/","title":{"rendered":"Jacqueline Winspear: The White Lady"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Jacqueline Winspear\u2019s The White Lady <\/em>spans two wars. Despite this epic scope, the book has the feel of an intimate character study.\u00a0 Luckily, the character at the center of the novel, Elinor White, is well worth a look.\u00a0 As a little girl in Belgium with an British mother and a Belgian father, the book opens as the war begins and little Lini\u2019s father is gone.\u00a0 Somehow, even as a 10 year old, Elinor knows she will never see her father again, so she, her mother, and her older sister, Ceci, form a tight unit, a unit that becomes much tighter during the German occupation of their little village. When a strange woman asks them to help out, the two girls become a part of the resistance.<\/p>\n

Winspear\u2019s careful laying of the groundwork of recruiting resistance fighters and putting them to work was an unusual detail, one I haven\u2019t seen in the war novels I\u2019ve read.\u00a0 It\u2019s fascinating to see how Elinor takes to the work.\u00a0 She’s able to push down her emotions and function – as she is taught \u2013 as a predator, with a healthy dose of fear.\u00a0 Ceci doesn\u2019t take to it quite as readily, and one of the puzzles of the book are the two different paths the girls eventually take.<\/p>\n

As the book goes back and forth timeline wise, we also encounter Elinor \u2013 now a seasoned agent \u2013 during WWII, as well as just post war, as London is struggling with gangs.\u00a0 The gangs were another unusual detail, and the only recent literary echo is in Allison Montclair\u2019s excellent series set just post war.\u00a0 Elinor is drawn back into \u201cthe life\u201d as she sees it affecting her neighbors, a hardworking mother and father with a sweet little girl.\u00a0 Elinor especially takes to the little girl and there\u2019s a secret there as well, one that\u2019s not unraveled until the end of the novel.<\/p>\n

One of the things that really makes this novel stand out is the author\u2019s portrait of Elinor.\u00a0 We see Elinor as a young girl, a sponge, learning the lessons of war from an expert.\u00a0 We see her as an accomplished adult, fulfilling her task of organizing resistance in WWII Belgium.\u00a0 And we see her later, as a traumatized adult, sorting through the ways she\u2019s learned to live with the things she\u2019s done.<\/p>\n

The other thread that caught me was the underestimation of women.\u00a0 It starts with Elinor as a young girl \u2013 no one would expect her to do the things she does.\u00a0 It\u2019s the women in the marketplace, fighting for a place in the breadline.\u00a0 It\u2019s a secretary.\u00a0 It\u2019s the sister of the gang leader.\u00a0 The true message of this novel might be: don\u2019t underestimate women.\u00a0 And Winspear provides the reader with concrete examples of why you shouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

And of course, there\u2019s Winspear\u2019s trademark lovely prose, the kind of prose that leads to often reading with a lump in your throat.\u00a0 This is another indelible character from Jacqueline Winspear\u2019s talented pen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jacqueline Winspear\u2019s The White Lady spans two wars. Despite this epic scope, the book has the feel of an intimate character study.\u00a0 Luckily, the character at the center of the novel, Elinor White, is well worth a look.\u00a0 As a little girl in Belgium with an British mother and a Belgian father, the book opens … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1082,990,10,185,1081,1080,84,149],"class_list":["post-4836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-belgium","tag-harper","tag-historical","tag-jacqueline-winspear","tag-resistance-fighters","tag-the-white-lady","tag-wwi","tag-wwii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4836"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4838,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4836\/revisions\/4838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}