Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear

" Maisie Dobbs got her start as a maid in an aristocratic London household when she was thirteen. Her employer, suffragette Lady Rowan Compton, soon became her patron, taking the remarkably bright youngster under her wing. Lady Rowan's friend, Maurice Blanche, often retained as an investigator by the European elite, recognized Maisie’s intuitive gifts and helped her earn admission to the prestigious Girton College in Cambridge, where Maisie planned to complete her education. The outbreak of war changed everything. Maisie trained as a nurse, then left for France to serve at the Front, where she found—and lost—an important part of herself. Ten years after the Armistice, in the spring of 1929, Maisie sets out on her own as a private investigator, one who has learned that coincidences are meaningful, and truth elusive. Her very first case involves suspected infidelity but reveals something very different. In the aftermath of the Great War, a former officer has founded a working farm known as The Retreat, that acts as a convalescent refuge for ex-soldiers too shattered to resume normal life. When Fate brings Maisie a second case involving The Retreat, she must finally confront the ghost that has haunted her for over a decade...."    from Amazon

Maisie Dobbs 시리즈를 알리는 첫 번째 작품이다. 역사허구소설, 여성 성장 소설, 전쟁고발소설, 미스터리 코지소설 등 다양한 관점에서 작품을 읽을 수 있다. 여주인공의 어린 시절과 주위의 도움으로 대학에 들어가는 이야기 그리고 간호사로서 1차 세계대전의 잔혹함을 목격하는 이야기들이 작품에 잘 나타나 있다. 그리고 미스터리한 공동체의 비밀을 해결하는 과정이 장편의 지루함을 잊게 만드는 흥미로운 작품이었다. 문장이나 표현이 다소 어려울 수 있지만 내용을 이해하는데 큰 문제가 되지는 않기 때문에 읽을 만한 작품이다. 작품에 등장하는 인물들이 시대를 넘어서 매력적이라는 것을 알 수 있다.  

bearing, anonymous, Warren Street, maid, nameplate, The extraordinary hides behind the camouflage of the ordinary, deceived, smokescreen, headstone, cemetery, cuckolding, referrals, solicitors, thread, web, The War, allow the past to have a voice, infatuation, being silenced, conscription, allow grief room to air itself, Retreat, community, untoward about the motives, melancholy, injuries, equality, suffragette, It is only when it is close to hand that we have a grasp of what it means to be unequal, costermonger, library, Kierkegaard, newfangled, seeing is not necessarily something one does with the eyes, jealousy, the challenge of position and place, moral science, solitude, class, chasm, betwixt and between, enlisted, beside oneself, War Office, F-A-N-Y First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, farewell, brace oneself, the future when you've seen so many passing through who don't have tomorrow, let alone next year. No future at all, stipulation, comrades, enigma, special services, while there is always a victor and a vanquished, on both sides there are innocents, nature of a mask, disfigured, dawn, go gaga, hamlet, Desertion, scuffle, innocuous, gargoles, gallow, fight like with like, hangman, bloke, interred, execution, control, cult, cloister, slaughterhouse, scars, truth grows even more powerful when it is suppressed, MG, Psychologist and Investigator 등이 작품을 이해하는데 중요한 표현들인 거 같다.