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During the first bewildering months of the pandemic, when grocery stores seemed ominous and even a stranger’s cough could quicken the pulse, Laura Jensen Walker escaped to Dorset. Not literally. She went there in her imagination. Laura traveled backward as well as eastward, to an English village of bicycles, hedgerows, post offices, and people who knew one another’s business.
The destination became The Postmistress of Puddlington, Laura’s twenty-fifth book and the one she calls the book of her heart.
The retreat was not merely professional. The pandemic had awakened PTSD connected to an attack Laura survived at nineteen. She found herself drawn toward a period in which fear seemed to possess a recognizable shape. Laura served in the Air Force and was stationed in England in her twenties. She turned to the Second World War not for its battles but for its rituals of endurance. Blackout curtains, village committees, cups of tea, small acts of usefulness took center stage while catastrophe waited just beyond the horizon.
Her heroine, Hester Smith, begins in 1934 as a shy, bookish spinster delivering the post by bicycle through the fictional Dorset village of Puddlington. At first, the contents of her satchel are ordinary. Letters, parcels, the modest machinery of everyday life. Then war arrives, and Hester becomes the bearer of War Department telegrams. Suddenly, the village postmistress is carrying death from house to house.
Laura is interested less in battlefield heroism than in the peculiar intimacy of this burden. Hester knows the young men whose deaths she announces. She knows their mothers. She knows which doors she must knock upon and what the sight of her approaching bicycle has come to mean.
But Laura resists turning Puddlington into an extended dirge. The novel’s animating force is fellowship, particularly among women. Hester falls in with a vicar’s wife, a land girl named Violet, and the magnificently named Lady Minerva Winterbottom, a bohemian former suffragette. When Hester decides she needs to learn self-defense, Minerva introduces her to “suffrajitsu,” the martial-arts techniques adopted by some British suffragettes to protect themselves from police and hostile men.
Soon the Women’s Institute is learning how to fight back. There is something pleasingly characteristic about Laura’s delight in this discovery. She describes herself as a “pantser,” a novelist who writes without rigid outlines and allows characters to reveal where the story ought to go. It is an approach that seems increasingly consistent with her life. A recent diagnosis of neurodivergence supplied explanations for experiences she had spent decades regarding as personal peculiarities: sensitivity to heat, aversions to certain food textures, and an almost existential hostility toward spreadsheets. The discovery, she tells me, was liberating. She is already carrying some of that recognition into another character, in her forthcoming The Pilgrimage of Primrose Honeychurch.
A fellow writer once called Laura a “genre butterfly.” It’s an unusually accurate description for someone who has moved through domestic humor, chick-lit, cozy mysteries, and now historical fiction. Yet the apparent wandering conceals a persistent subject. Laura writes about people discovering that whatever they believed made them inadequate may also become the source of their strength.
One reviewer complained that The Postmistress of Puddlington lacked the expected grit of wartime fiction. Laura did not seem especially troubled. Perhaps that is the point. There is already plenty of grit available.
What Puddlington offers instead is the radical possibility of gentleness. Women helping one another. Frightened people behaving bravely. Grief being carried communally. And the reassuring sight of someone familiar coming down the lane with a satchel full of news.
During a pandemic, Laura Jensen Walker went looking for refuge in the past.
What she found there was not only her most heartfelt work of literary art, but a way back to herself.