The Secret of Elizabeth is poised between Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). Like The Woman in White, whose author it specifically invokes, it’s told in fragments–diaries, letters, retrospective musings–and there’s a dash of Victorian melodrama to the plot, which features psychiatric institutions and purity fanatics, and a sort of quasi-Victorian concern with sexual morality. Like Gone Girl, there’s a woman who causes trouble both when she turns up and when she disappears (we find out about events in that order), and an obsession with what lies beneath the surface of happy marriages, and innocent girls, and well-intentioned men (though it’s not clear whether Caspary and I consider all of the same men to be villains).
An amnesiac young woman turns up wearing a white dress in the woods of Connecticut, and is picked up by Kate and Allan on their way home from a cocktail party. Their marriage has been strained since the loss of their baby daughter Elizabeth; they give the foundling her name, considering her in her distress and her lack of a past to be a child in spite of her years. She slots into their home easily, playing tennis with Allan (her muscle memory seems to be intact) and learning to help Kate around the house. But it soon becomes clear that everybody wants something from her–Kate, Allan, nearby English literature professor Chauncey Greenleaf, and a journalist looking for a scoop, and the various sinister strangers who turn up in the wealthy Connecticut suburb claiming her as their own–and that she might have done something very bad.
‘Among the dense foliage a white shape moved like a spectre, indistinct at first, then clearly seen, hidden again by thick brush, and after the car had rounded a curve, its headlights picked out a girl in a white dress. His foot remained steady on the accelerator.
‘Aren’t you going to stop?’ Kate demanded.
‘What for?’
‘Go back, dear, please go back.’ Kate’s tone was frantic. ‘She may need help.’
Allan was unsure. City crime had crept into the countryside. Young women were said to carry guns. Better for a man to mind his own business in these parlous days.’
Throughout, there’s an ambiguity around Elizabeth’s role and her own interior thoughts and purpose–we get an extract from her journal to read, and we get her telling her story, but having read Gone Girl we know just what value to place on this. What is clear, however, is Caspary’s sardonic commentary on both men who prefer women to remain mysteries and men who won’t permit women to have any secrets at all.
The Secret of Elizabeth is a fun read and an intriguing one, not so much because of the resolution to the mystery, which might be a disappointment, but because of how it all unfolds, and the sense of voice and character and atmosphere it offers. Caspary’s Laura (1943), incidentally, is a great novel and a great film.
