The Lost Girls of Paris: A Novel

Published in 2019, The Lost Girls of Paris is a historical fiction novel by Pam Jenoff. Set between 1943 and 1946, the novel uses the perspectives of three women—Marie Roux, Eleanor Trigg, and Grace Healey—to depict the final days of World War II and its aftermath. Marie and Eleanor are spies for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), and their stories are set amid the war, while the third protagonist, Grace Healey, investigates their activities after the fact. The novel alternates between these dual timelines.

Pam Jenoff worked at the Pentagon and served as a diplomat for the State Department, handling Holocaust issues in Poland. In this novel, she examines The Importance of Ensuring Historical Accuracy and explores the morally ambiguous world of espionage; other key themes include The Strength of Wartime Bonds and The Double-Edged Sword of Secrecy. The fictional experiences of Marie Roux and Eleanor Trigg are loosely based upon the real-life accounts of SOE agents such as Vera Atkins. Jenoff is also the author of several other historical novels, including The Orphan’s Tale (2017) and The Woman With the Blue Star (2021).

This guide refers to the 2019 paperback edition published by Park Row Books.

Content Warning: Both the source text and this guide contain depictions of rape, wartime violence, suicidal ideation, torture, and murder.

Plot Summary

Eleanor Trigg works for a department of the British government called Special Operations Executive (SOE): a wartime department created by Winston Churchill. The SOE’s mission is to support resistance movements in Nazi-occupied countries by engaging in sabotage, gathering information, and providing weapons. In 1943, she advises the Director of SOE to use female agents, arguing that they will blend in more effectively. The SOE Director gives Eleanor the job of running the female unit.

One year later, Eleanor recruits Marie Roux, a single mother living in London. Marie’s daughter, Tess, was evacuated along with many other children to escape the German bombings of the city. Marie is also fluent in French. She is sent to the SOE training grounds in Scotland, where she makes friends with a fellow trainee named Josie. The SOE is in the late stages of planning a mission in northern France: the destruction of a bridge that allows the Germans to deliver supplies and troops to Normandy, where the Allies will soon conduct their D-Day invasion. Josie is deployed early because the SOE needs extra help in this endeavor.

Marie and Josie are both trained as wireless radio operators. It will be their job to send and receive transmissions in Morse code, transmitting in secret to avoid discovery by the Nazis or the French police. The complex job requires them to sign on with their wireless set at predetermined times and encode their messages using ciphers. They can only send their messages on specific frequencies, using crystal diodes that they carry with their radios.

A little over a month after Josie is deployed, Marie is sent to the same area. Before Marie goes to France, Eleanor takes her locket for safekeeping. In its place, she gives Marie a necklace that contains a cyanide pill in case she is captured. As soon as Marie lands in France, she realizes that she will need to do much more than operate the wireless. She learns that Josie has been helping with supply drops to the French resistance. The apartment where Marie will live and transmit messages is in a small village. This is in the same building in which Nazi SS officers are staying. This region, northwest of Paris, is known as the Vesper network because the operations are led by a man (Julian) whose alias is Vesper. He and Marie soon fall in love.

Almost immediately after Marie’s deployment to France, Eleanor notices strange discrepancies in Marie’s messages. Eleanor and Marie do not yet realize it, but the Germans have infiltrated the wireless network and are impersonating Marie, so some of the messages that Eleanor receives are truly from Marie, while others are from the Germans.

The Director dismisses Eleanor’s concerns. (It will later be revealed that the Director knows the Germans have infiltrated the network; he is purposefully continuing to transmit so that he can feed the Germans false information.)

When Marie helps Julian to retrieve a package of TNT from Paris, they are nearly caught but manage to escape. The next morning, Julian leaves for London because he has been called to headquarters for meetings. There, he talks with Eleanor and learns of her concerns.

When Julian flies back to France, the Nazis capture him. In Julian’s absence, Marie and Julian’s cousin, Will, blow up the bridge. Will tries to get Marie to fly back to England with him, but she spends a week in a safehouse in Paris before returning to her apartment for her radio. She is arrested there and taken to Nazi headquarters, where she sees Julian.

Hans Kriegler, head of the Nazi intelligence agency, shoots Julian to force Marie to send coded transmissions to London. After killing Julian, Kreigler sends Marie to Fresnes prison for almost a month. While she is there, the D-Day invasion takes place. Before the Allied forces can reach the prison, the Germans load all the prisoners onto trains. During the evacuation, Marie finds Josie, who is near death. Bombs strike the train tracks. In the chaos, Josie explodes a grenade, killing a few German guards and giving Marie the chance to escape.

Marie survives, but Eleanor does not learn of this until years later because the Director fires her around the time of Marie’s arrest. Worried about the 12 missing SOE agents, including Josie and Marie, Eleanor spends years trying to track down their whereabouts but is unsuccessful.

In 1946, two years after firing Eleanor, the Director contacts her again and asks her to go to Europe to find out what happened to the missing SOE agents. He wants her to go because she is making trouble for him by asking questions. She still doesn’t know about his guilt and betrayal, so she agrees.

Eleanor follows leads that take her to Dachau, where Kriegler is being held in advance of his trial for his war crimes. Eleanor interviews Kreigler, who tells her that someone at London headquarters betrayed the SOE field agents. He gives her a key to a safe deposit box in a Swiss bank. There, Eleanor finds proof that the SOE’s communications were compromised.

Eleanor confronts the Director with her findings. He confesses to having known that the Germans had infiltrated the network, but he defends his actions by claiming that he was acting for the greater good. Eleanor is implicated in the scandal because he used her letterhead to send a memo approving further transmissions. He also confirms that Marie is alive. Eleanor sets out to clear her name, find Marie, and figure out a way to go public with the information. She flies to New York to find Marie. In her suitcase, she carries photographs of the 12 SOE agents who had been unaccounted for.

In alternating chapters throughout the novel, the character of Grace Healey is introduced; her story picks up where Eleanor’s ends. Eleanor dies in New York City in 1946, accidentally struck by a car while trying to meet Marie at Grand Central Station. Grace does not know Eleanor but finds her suitcase abandoned in the station. Grace is intrigued by the photographs inside the suitcase and begins investigating.

Grace Healey’s husband died just after he graduated officer’s training and before he was deployed to Europe with the American military. After her husband’s death, Grace moved to New York City and now works for an immigration lawyer.

Grace uses her connections and the help of her romantic interest, Mark Dorff, to investigate the owner of the suitcase and the women in the photographs. After discovering the same proof that Eleanor did about the compromised SOE communications, Grace mistakenly concludes that Eleanor betrayed the SOE agents. It is only after she finds Marie and hears her story that she understands the full picture. Grace helps Marie submit a statement to the British government to clear Eleanor’s name and to get office status for the missing SOE agents.