The Postmistress

The Postmistress is a 2010 novel by Sarah Blake. Set in 1940’s London, in the fall of the onset of World War II, it tracks the endeavors of three women who fight against the uncertainty and confusion of wartime Europe and the United States. Its title refers to one of these women, Iris James, a female postmaster who runs the post facility in the coastal town of Franklin, Massachusetts. James communicates by post with a young, antisocial yet married woman named Emma Fitch. The two women learn about different perspectives of the war from each other’s correspondence. They both listen to the third protagonist, an eccentric American girl named Frankie Bard, who lives in London and works as a radio reporter. Bard is watched closely by her supervisor, Edward R. Murrow, and broadcasts a highly controlled image of the effects of war in Europe to an American audience in the months before Pearl Harbor. These three intertwined narratives explore the limits of communication as it is overwhelmed by starkly different national, cultural, social, and political contexts.

The novel begins in a London that is being besieged by German bombs at the beginning of World War II. Frankie Bard is speaking on the radio, communicating with British ground troops that are firing shells at the legions of German fighter pilots that are dropping bombs on the city. At the same time, she communicates with the frightened survivors of the bombing, who hide underground in overcrowded bomb shelters. Murrow, who believes Bard is a prodigious newscaster but has a controlling leadership style, instructs her to repeat information from the war front to her listeners while minimizing the use of graphic imagery, instead using benign contextual details about the state of the city streets. For instance, instead of stating that the streets are slick with blood, she is instructed to say, “the little policeman I usually say ‘Hello’ to every morning is not there today.” The communities in hiding wait on her every transmission and communally react to each new bit of news.

As the war worsens, Bard increasingly struggles to negotiate her instructions to convey details of the war neutrally with her outrage at the atrocity she observes being inflicted on London.
Privately, she begins to broadcast her true observations to listeners from America, who happen to be the other two protagonists, James and Fitch, who each live initially in Franklin, Massachusetts. At first, they try to ignore Bard’s reports, but soon are galvanized and outraged by what they hear. James, who works at the local post office, takes pride in maintaining order in the town by keeping the mail moving out efficiently. Informed by her role, she believes that the war cannot be as bad as Bard states, believing there must be some intelligible order to the events taking place in Europe.



Fitch, who is newly wed to Will, the town doctor, soon travels to London to help the British forces with the delivery of medical aid after the German Blitz. She is more personally interested in the broadcast than James because it overlaps with her domain of emotional involvement and war experience. Yet, Fitch feels that the war has taken over her young-adult life, and her self-consciousness about the irrevocability of time prevents her from being altruistically motivated. Feeling estranged from Will, she listens in vain to the news for mentions of him.

Meanwhile, Bard travels across Europe by train, recording the narratives of Jews who are fleeing Nazi persecution on a small recording device. Bard faces her own anxiety over the question of whether it is possible to tell the “whole story” about the war, as well as her career objectives to write the story that successfully alerts America about its gravity. She grows to understand that no such story exists; rather, the war is made up of a fabric of singular human narratives. Bard resolves to tell the story of these individuals in order to best document the events of the war. Motivated by her personal hero, the contemporary journalist Martha Gellhorn, she shares the same sense of despair that the stories are not catching on to American minds, who are too emotionally disconnected and viewing the distantly raging war through derealization.

Through Bard’s efforts to translate the war to a remote crowd, a reception ultimately exemplified in the narratives of the two listeners, James and Fitch, Blake develops the argument that humans are intrinsically too self-conscious to empathize with subjectivities distantly outside the context of one’s experience. This impasse remains even when the flow of information is augmented by technology, no matter what the intentions or skill of the reporters are. Ultimately, Blake suggests, the people at the frontlines of combat are the only ones who experience its alienation before it ripples out into the public, diminished in power.