WOMEN WITH SECRETS

I'm still loving the Maisie Dobbs mystery series by Jacqueline Winspear. Each book has been a most enjoyable little history lesson for me, as it follows the pre-WWI life of a young British girl entering service in one of the big country manor houses; to the suffragettes and Maisie's education and mentoring by a gentleman who dabbles in investigation, psychology, and special jobs for the government; through the Great War and her years as a field nurse in France; and the difficult recovery period that everyone went through afterwards, from the shell-shocked and damaged veterans whom the general population kept urging to "just get over it!", to the women with no marriage prospects, now that so many young men had died, who were having to figure out how to make it on their own.

I'm now on the eighth book in the series (is there anything better than discovering a great series rather late in the game, when there is so much catching up to do?), A Lesson in Secrets. This one is set in the period leading up to WWII, and Maisie has been recruited by the Secret Service to go undercover on a college campus, to monitor any activities "not in the interests of His Majesty's government." When I first started this series, it reminded me a lot of the PBS series, Downton Abbey, but with this book we are shifting more into the territory of their recent mini-series, Benchley Circle. In fact, they just mentioned hiring Girl Guides (the British version of Girl Scouts) as message carriers when it turned out the male scouts were more interested in play than work, and went on to talk about the talented female code-breakers, who weren't allowed to tell anyone about what they had contributed to the war effort. Fascinating stuff!

Anyhoo, if you are a fan of mysteries, period novels, the women's movement, or all of the above, I highly recommend this series.