Madeline Martin’s bookish heroines
This Christmas, while looking for gifts for others, I found a novel that grabbed my attention, then went looking for more from the author. In these particular works, Madeline Martin’s characters work in libraries and bookshops, and meet the needs of customers and community through literature. Works of fiction, imagination, stories show their readers who we are and can be, when they need encouragement the most. These characters and their stories are set, as it happens, in the most trying of times: war. World War II England, France, Portugal, and Poland. I am not usually one who seeks out war stories, although I have told one story from WWII within my (in)humanity performance series (At War: Eickmann v Wallenberg). If these books had been introduced to me as war-time stories, I may not have opened them. They were quite hard to read at times, with children sent away from mothers to escape the bombing; parents, sons, neighbours, and friends killed in so many horrific ways; and the fear and hatred stirred up by propaganda. The latter all the more confronting as such patterns of propaganda and unjust government policies are repeated more and more in our own times. We never learn.
The women in Martin’s novels – all her leads are women – show the reader the profound power in story; potent against the violent backdrop of war. In a tube station in London during air raids, Grace reads a story aloud and takes the listeners out of their nightmare into a place far away. It brings comfort, offers escape, and draws people together, helping them to endure the unendurable.[i]
In Lisbon a librarian with the US embassy deciphers a code in one of the resistance papers she collects, gathering information to send home in a bid to help strategists win the war. Ava’s actions help a mother and child escape Lyons, find passage to America, and reunite with husband / papa. In Lyons, Elaine lost all her co-workers on that paper; peaceful resisters using words in defence, for endurance, in the face of great inhumanity.[ii]
In Warsaw, the resistance is not always peaceful or non-violent. Alongside the violent disruption they perpetrate, Zofia and her friends carefully salvage thousands of banned books from burning at the hands of the Nazis. They store them in a hidden library, they read and talk about them, defying oppression, fear, and hatred. These women taught and learned in hidden schools, insisting on their right to an education, to the children’s right to their childhoods, investing in a future they could hardly dare to dream. Books in the ghetto offered escape and hope when either was so hard to find for the Jewish captives inside.[iii]
Emma’s father died in a fire in his bookshop when she was a child. The memory of him helps his daughter find work in a library when the money runs out and being a widow with a child makes finding work impossible. Books, which she had left behind with her grief, return when she needs them, as solace when her daughter leaves town for refuge from the bombs, and forging new connection with and for her daughter, for whom a love of learning has so far proved elusive.[iv]
Stories matter. These stories tell us of women, whose stories have been obscured from much of our history telling. What stories we choose to tell and hear matters. These stories show us the power of story, of writing, telling, sharing, reading, insisting on story. Through story characters find empathy, hope, courage to endure or fight, connection with self and community, with our humanity. Through story, these characters who are surrounded by so much death, find and hang on to life.
These stories invited me to pause, to acknowledge the courageous women in our history, to see the history that is being repeated around us, and to consider my response. I have paid attention, reading these stories myself. Now, how will these stories move me to resist oppression, stand for justice, and offer hope to neighbours in despair?
[i] Martin, Madeline. The Last Bookshop in London, Toronto: Hanover Square, 2021.
[ii] Martin, Madeline. The Librarian Spy, Sydney: Harlequin, 2022.
[iii] Martin, Madeline. The Keeper of Hidden Books, Sydney: Harlequin, 2023.
[iv] Martin, Madeline. The Booklover’s Library, Sydney: Harlequin, 2024.
