The Invisible Woman, by Erika Robuck

A complex and nuanced historical novel with an unforgettable heroine.

Her nom de guerre is Diane, but she is Virginia Hall, a young modern and affluent American studying in Paris in 1926 when she is introduced in the novel The Invisible Woman. She is daring, going to see Josephine Baker sing bare-breasted, and feisty, whacking her boyfriend when he kisses another girl at a party. Jump forward to March, 1944, Virginia’s gaiety is gone as she makes her way toward Haute-Loire, France, accompanied by Cuthbert, her prosthetic leg, on a mission to “unleash hell on the Nazis.” In wartime France as an SOE/OSS agent, Virginia chooses the name Diane, picked to spite the Nazis who’d called her Artemis, the Greek goddess equivalent to the Roman’s goddess Diane. The Gestapo also called her “the Limping Lady.”

The plot of the novel is fast paced. The reader stays on the edge of her seat during every airdrop Diane arranges, every coded message she sends, and every Nazi checkpoint she must pass as she moves deeper into France. The characters are well developed through a third person narrative written from Diane’s point of view. The narrative technique is skillfully employed by the author to make the danger real and convey the heartbreak suffered by members of the French Resistance when one of their members, often a spouse or relative, is captured or killed. Interwoven into the story are many flashbacks that tell Virginia’s story: her childhood summers at Box Horn Farm in America, where as she got older she had the nickname “Dindy,” her “lightning-fast romance” with Emil in the 1930s, and the accident in Smyrna in 1933 when her leg must be amputated. The last is a turning point in the story, not directly related to the war but significant in that it made Virginia into the determined woman who later became a heroine.

The characters in The Invisible Woman are brilliantly crafted and make the novel a literary work. They are sometimes as reckless as they are brave, and they are emotionally complex, revealing as Diane interacts with them the fears and sorrows in their lives, and giving testament to the atrocities inflicted upon them by the Germans. As the story moves forward, D-Day looms, “The long sobs of the violins of autumn,” and arrives, when the “heart is drowned in the slow sound, languorous and long.” Then the German barbarity explodes, the actions and characters so monstrous that one must put down the book occasionally to take a breath, as if looking away from the horrible carnage depicted in a movie. The monsters, unforgettably described, are Anton Haas, the German MP, an early pursuer of the Limping Lady, and Robert Alesch, the haughty priest with “ice-blue eyes” and “doughy white skin,” who betrayed the Resistance for the Gestapo’s money. And then, finally, comes the story’s zenith, brought by a Jedburgh named Paul Goillot, his real name. For Diane it is the beginning of a metamorphosis from the leader of le Corps Franc Diane to Virginia Hall.

Erika Robuck carefully researched the heroine and events in The Invisible Woman. This is clearly shown in the Afterword and additional information at the end of the book. Beside Virginia Hall, many of the characters are based, sometimes loosely and sometimes precisely, on real participants in the French Resistance. What is most remarkable about the novel, however, is not historical accuracy but the magnificent creation of the characters in the book. Virginia Hall is brought to life in the story, as is the depiction of her life struggle and the horrible circumstances in France inflicted by the Nazis in World War II. Robuck’s novel is a beautiful work, so complex and nuanced that readers will carry the story with them for a long time.

For more about Erika Robuck, visit her website at http://www.erikarobuck.com.