Lilac Girls Sparknotes

The novel, Lilac Girls, by Martha Hall Kelly is written before The Berlin Airlift. The bestselling novel displays how these three women’s lives took place during that time period. Caroline Ferriday, a wealthy Francophile and the first narrator who is involved in charitable efforts on behalf of French orphans. The author Martha Hall Kelly writes the novel in first person to tell the story of lives of these girls based on how she saw it. She uses setting and characters to display the actual time in history and how everything went down. The novel Lilac Girls compares how history really was and what the characters acted like and how the setting was during the Berlin Airlift.

In the novel, the author stays true to some characteristics of the main character Caroline Ferriday. A wealthy

Francophile and the first narrator who is involved in charitable efforts on behalf of French orphans.

The author speaks in first person as she is Caroline, she wants to tell the real story of what happened. For example, Martha Hall Kelly states, “ I do feel like something inhabited me the day I stepped into the lovely Bellamy- Ferriday House. Caroline? The Rabbits? Whoever they were, they led me on an incredible journey, through Poland, Germany and France to find the truth about this story. Perhaps all of those brace women, almost seventy years after WWII, wanted their story told”. Martha Kelly wants the real story to be told about history she wants nothing but the truth. She took in her ideas from the inside of Caroline’s house she felt like this was a story that needed to be heard. In a conversation, with Lynn Cullen she states, “I found two manuscripts in Caroline’s archives, memoirs written by two of

the so-called Rabbits. Caroline had paper-clipped the rejection letters from publishers to the manuscripts, as well as her apologetic notes to the women, telling them she had submitted their work to publishers and there was no interest in this stories”. The author knew that these rejection letters were important to this story in history, and she knew how bad Caroline and the Rabbits wanted their story to be told. So, she took these letters and every other fact she had to tell the story of these three girls in history. Even though the author didn’t know exactly the whole truth she made it known that Caroline Ferriday and the Rabbits were very important to this lesson in history.
The author stays true to the setting of novel Lilac Girls. The setting was in the 1930’s before the Berlin Airlift, but it is also right before Germany invades Poland. The novel states, “It was late September of 1939, but the air was warm still, “Fuhrer- weather” they called it, since it permitted Hitler’s success in his campaigns”. The author uses this piece of evidence to show the comparison between the book’s setting and the actual setting of history. For example, the article goes on to state, “In 1948, the Soviet Union attempted to limit the ability of U.S., British, and French occupation forces to travel to their respective sectors in the German capital of Berlin, which was within Soviet- occupied East Germany.” This piece of evidence also shows how the author stayed true to the setting, but it goes into further detail. It shows where the war was located and how the land was before the war hit. Martha Hall Kelly does not know the whole story behind the Berlin Airlift, but she tells it as best as she can through the setting.
In conclusion, the novel remained exact to the history of the Berlin Airlift, but most of the vivid art between characters and setting were creative license. The creativity the author used gave the novel more of an interesting story so the reader would stay captivated with the plot of the story. Various amount of the population loves a delightful novel with tragic family history but still states the truth to the history that has been written.