A fascinating but largely forgotten figure from Canadian wartime history might finally get her due. Novelist Heather Marshall’s latest work, The Secret History of Audrey James, uses the incredible life of Nova Scotia-born, Second World War heroine Mona Parsons as narrative scaffolding for her imagined title character. 

“Why wasn’t this war heroine, who lived this extraordinary life, in my Canadian history book?” asks Marshall, who holds master’s degrees in Canadian history and political science, and whose gripping historical fiction has spotlighted marginalized real-life women before. 

Her 2022 bestselling debut, Looking for Jane, explored the Canadian version of the Jane Collective, an underground abortion network that operated in the 1970s, as well as a government-sponsored, postwar program that forced roughly 300,000 unmarried pregnant Canadian women to surrender their babies for adoption. 

Parsons’ stranger-than-fiction story is even more jaw-dropping. As Parsons biographer Andrea Hill Lehr explains on her website monaparsons.ca, she was “a 1920s New York chorus girl, a Depression-era nurse, the wife of a Dutch millionaire, an underground worker in the resistance, a prisoner of the Nazis, and an emaciated fugitive who walked across Nazi Germany in the dying months of World War II.”

In a phone interview from her home outside Toronto, Marshall notes that Parsons was, “to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the only Canadian civilian woman to be sentenced to death and imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II.” Her nonchalance upon receiving the death penalty for harbouring Allied soldiers in her Dutch home in December 1941 prompted the presiding judge to commute her sentence, a scene recreated in The Secret History of Audrey James.

“And yet her headstone [in Wolfville, N.S.]  lists her as ‘the wife of Major General HW Foster.’ That’s it,” says Marshall, who worked in politics and communications before focusing on fiction.  “It never ceases to amaze me how undervalued women are.”

The Secret History of Audrey James traces two intertwined trajectories, propelled by the titular character. One, set in Berlin between 1938 and 1945, follows Audrey as she joins a German-led Nazi resistance movement called the Red Orchestra. It, too, is based on a real rebel cell that Marshall discovered in her research. Though Parsons supported the Dutch resistance (her first husband, Willem Leonhardt, was Dutch), the link between character and person is clear.

“German resistance seemed less discussed than similar movements in occupied France,” Marshall says. “So that felt fresh, and it blended so well with this other story I wanted to tell.”

Simultaneously, Audrey is hiding her best friend Ilse, a Jew, in the attic of Ilse’s home after her family is captured by Nazis, who then appropriate the grand and seemingly empty residence. Audrey becomes a maid to the soldiers so she can covertly keep Ilse hidden, and alive. 

That story was inspired by a real-life figure named Elsa Koditschek, “a Jewish woman who managed to hide from the Nazis in her own attic in Vienna, even after a high-ranking Nazi officer – Herbert Gerbing – moved in downstairs when the SS confiscated her home,” Marshall writes in her extensively detailed author’s note. The author stumbled on Koditschek’s story through a New York Times article. “The idea of her returning to the one place she wanted to be, which was also the last place anyone would look, took such raw nerve,” she says of Koditschek.

The second storyline in Audrey James jumps ahead to 2010 and finds the protagonist managing an inn in a small, bucolic town in the north of England. Now elderly, Audrey hires a much younger assistant, Kate Mercer, who is escaping a pending divorce in London and seeking peace in the countryside. Audrey eventually reveals her remarkable story, which also includes unrequited love, a cruelly thwarted musical career, a grisly prison stint and a dramatic assassination attempt on Hitler as part of the resistance. 

The book’s chapters alternate between Kate with Audrey in the aughts and Audrey with Ilse during the Second World War. Both storylines are vivid, thanks to Marshall’s ability to suss out and animate real stories with fictional details supported by her granular historical research, which drops readers directly into the scenes. 

Marshall focuses on the senses. “What did things smell like, feel like, sound like? Our human experiences are so tied to that,” she says. She also worked hard to unearth technical details. “For example, what was the heating system in a German home of that era? And not just that era but when that home was built? That might seem mundane but it’s so important in historical fiction. Readers of the genre want to be immersed in an era.”

Of all the stunning things Marshall uncovered during her research, she found Kristallnacht – the devastating, two-night Nazi vandalism sprees in Jewish neighbourhoods in November 1938, which are conjured in the novel – most upsetting. “Horrific,” she says. “It’s important we write these books and tell these stories so that people are reminded of these atrocities.”

And while she writes about things in the past, Marshall’s sensibilities remain rooted in the present. Her website has a page called “Justice,” offering readers of Looking for Jane more information “about the treatment of girls and women at these government-funded maternity homes in the postwar era [who] want to do something about it.”

Marshall wants The Secret History of Audrey James to posthumously elevate Parsons. “I hope people take what they learn here and go learn more,” she says. “I’m happy to shine well-deserved light on Mona Parsons. How had I not heard of her before? I will continue to write about and celebrate women.”