By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: Despite the marketing towards The Girl Who Never Left by Alison Stuart focuses on a mystery, the mystery is probably the least important aspect of it. Instead it is the character development of a woman exploring a new life after the death of her husband.
Helen Morrow’s husband Charlie is killed in The Great War/WWI. Instead of returning to her native Australia, she moves into her late husband's family estate, Holdston. Helen befriends her mother in law, Evelyn and Paul, Charlie's cousin who suffers from his own war ghosts. Helen finds an old diary written by an ancestor of Paul and Charlie's depicting an unhappy marriage and some dark secrets. Helen and Paul investigate the diary's revelations as they fall in love and deal with their own traumas.
By far the most fascinating aspects of the book are Helen and Paul’s post-war struggles. It's hard to live in the present when the past is so brutal and violent.
Helen is forced to live her life in a new place surrounded by strangers. She is far from Australia and constantly feels like she is being judged. She feels out of place in her late husband's wealthy home. The formidable Lady Evelyn, Charlie's mother, hovers between domineering matriarch and welcoming grandmotherly type. Helen isn't sure whether she is welcome or not.
She makes some good friends though. Servants Sarah and Sam Pollard provide steady sources of comfort and understanding for the bereaved widow. She befriends Tony, a titled childhood friend of Charlies’, who develops an attraction to her. Her daughter, Alice thrives in Holdston.
What makes Helen’s journey profound is that of a WWI era widow starting her life over again. Even though she is in the grip of grief, depression, and mental anguish, she keeps it suppressed for Alice's sake. Being an impoverished single woman in the early 20th century, Helen can only depend on the charity of her in-laws to survive. It is a desperate situation and the reader is made to feel and understand it.
Besides Helen’s story, we also get a parallel subplot featuring Paul, Charlie's cousin and Helen's soon to be love interest. If Helen has the stress of living among strangers, Paul has to face the pain of coming home. He has to return to a life that remains the same while he came face to face with trauma, violence, and death. He would rather study archaeology in places like Mesopotamia than go home and face a family that loves him but can't understand what he is going through.
He has PTSD flashbacks of his time on the Front particularly with Charlie. He weighs his guilt, memories, shame, and anxieties of what he did and didn't do and the aftermath of those actions. Paul can't adjust to life back at home with so much baggage surrounding him.
The mystery that surrounds the book concerns an unhappy marriage, domestic violence, and the division between living one's truth and doing one's duty. It thematically shares much with the rest of the book but really it is not as important as Helen and Paul’s plots. The book could just as easily have gone without it.
Instead of focusing on a mystery, the book's true strength lies in the personal journeys of two people who have to start their lives over after being faced with death and the senseless violence of war.
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