The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Letters 1-31

Part 1, Letters 32-70

Part 1, Letters 71-105

Part 2, Letters 1-30

Part 2, Letters 31-63

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Part 2, Letters 1-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2, Letters 1-4 Summary

On May 22, Juliet writes to Sophie. She has arrived in Guernsey. She says she was nervous, since she had only gotten to know the Society members through their letters, and she fears she has lost the ability to live outside of the written word. When she met the members on the pier, however, she felt instantly welcome among them, though Kit was initially hesitant. Juliet expresses her worries about leaving Mark behind and wonders if not accepting his proposal is a big mistake. She is delighted by the beauty of Guernsey, however, and has arranged Elizabeth’s cottage for her purposes. She notes the intricate collections of objects and books Elizabeth had kept, trying to understand the woman through her possessions. For five days, she is escorted by Eben, Eli, Dawsey, or Isola around the island, visiting old pirate homes and various parishes with an ongoing commentary from her new friends on what things looked like before, during, and after the Occupation. She spends a lot of time with Amelia and Kit. Kit carries around a box with her but keeps the contents hidden. When she attends her first Society meeting, a new member, Jonas Skeeter, presents on The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. He says the only reason he read the book was because his friend Woodrow made him feel inferior for not reading. When he eventually did read the book, he was not impressed by Marcus Aurelius’s propensity to doubt every single decision. Jonas makes a crass comment, which heals the rift in their friendship, and the two men go to the local pub together.

Part 2, Letters 5-7 Summary

After more than a week in Guernsey, Juliet finds a letter slipped under her door from Henry A. Toussant, a friend of Isola’s. Henry tells Juliet of his actions in the war, specifically how he used to follow German soldiers from their brothel at night and scare them by whistling while hidden from sight. He also mentions what became of the women who were forced to work in the brothels, many of whom were brought in from occupied territories. After D-Day, the women were sent back to France by boat, but their boat sank because of the harsh sea, and they all drowned.

By June 6, Sidney has returned to London, and Juliet asks him to come visit Guernsey. She also tells him of her newfound routine with Kit, who spends her mornings playing games with Juliet. Juliet struggles to know how to participate in raising Kit properly and finds that she does not remember much of her own childhood. When she asks Amelia for advice, she tells her a story about her own son Ian, who was meant to be sent to England for boarding school. Having decided he did not want to go, he tried to run away from home. Elizabeth managed to convince him to buy a boat, and she built one for him in three days. Ian took it, and when he departed with it, it began to sink. Frightened and wet from the experience, he decided to do as he was told and go to boarding school after all.

Part 2, Letters 8-12 Summary

A week later, a letter arrives from France from a woman named Remy Giraud. She explains that she knew Elizabeth, as they had both been sent to the same concentration camp in Ravensbrück and that Elizabeth was executed in March 1945. Remy details how they met after she had been caught with forged ration cards in 1944. In the camp, they were placed in a barracks of 400 women. Their living conditions were deplorable; they were forced to work for the Siemens factory and barely had any food. Elizabeth would often talk about Guernsey and the book society. She also retained her protective habits during her time at the camp, taking the fall for a woman named Alina who had stolen a potato. She was sent to the punishment bunker for a week. It is this protective streak that would eventually lead her to her death, Remy explains, as Elizabeth had tried to protect a young girl who was being beaten for menstruating. Elizabeth was brought outside the camp and shot for interfering. In a separate letter, Sister Cecile Touvier tells the Society that Remy is incredibly ill due to the death march she and the other women were forced into in the days before the Russians liberated them. By the time Remy was found by American soldiers, she weighed less than 60 pounds, and her body was beset with famine edema. She cautions the Society against asking more questions about Ravensbrück.

In response to the news, Amelia asks Remy if she might be able to visit her in France, while Juliet turns to Sidney for comfort. She feels grief for Elizabeth, who seems to permeate the town through all the stories people have of her. When Mark contacts her and wants to come see her the following weekend, Juliet refuses, citing her and her friends’ grief.

Part 2, Letters 13-18 Summary

Dawsey and Amelia leave for Louviers. Dawsey reports to Juliet that he is struck by France’s utter destruction and how little of the natural forests remain. When they meet Remy, she is indeed as sickly as Sister Cecile made her out to be, and they discover she has no family left. When they ask if she would like to come stay in Guernsey, Remy speaks of using the government stipend for concentration camp survivors to leave the hospice and become an apprentice baker. Dawsey resolves to convince her otherwise. Given Remy’s possible visit, Juliet decides to keep Kit with her. In a letter to Sidney, she explains that Dawsey breaks the news to Kit about her mother’s death, and Juliet is reminded of when her own parents had died and how the Reverend’s cook had tried to make her feel better by plying her with cakes. She also worries about her book, as she finds it lacks proper structure. When Sidney brings up a clipping of Mark dancing with another woman, she responds by dismissing it.

On July 1, Sidney tells her that he plans to visit her in Guernsey and wants to meet everyone. Isola once again takes charge and plans to have him stay with her, and she surreptitiously asks if she should slip something in Sidney’s coffee in the morning, insinuating that she would like to help usher in their potential love match.

Part 2, Letters 19-22 Summary

Sidney arrives in Guernsey a few days later and makes the acquaintance of all the Society members, including Kit. In his letter to his sister, he notes that Juliet looks more alive and like her old self in Guernsey than they have seen her in a long time, and that she has taken to island life much better than life in London. At Sophie’s request, Sidney gives a detailed appraisal of Dawsey and finds that he likes the man much more than Mark Reynolds. He fears that if Juliet does end up marrying Mark, she will change completely and never write again.

Juliet still seems dedicated to her book, he remarks, as she had him follow her to many interviews on the topic of Guernsey’s Day of Liberation. Amid the retellings he heard, Sidney remembers the story of Mr. LeBrun, a retired postman, who witnessed British ships arriving at St. Sampson’s Harbor. One ship contained only one man, dressed in a caricature of an English gentleman and clasping a copy of the Times. The crowd went wild when they realized they could finally get news from England again.

After a few days, Juliet tells Sophie that Isola confronted Sidney about his relationship with Juliet and why they are not engaged. Sidney told her that while he loves Juliet, they could never marry since he is a gay man. Before he left, Sidney convinced Isola to read Pride and Prejudice and gifted her a cuckoo clock. Meanwhile, Juliet reports that Mark keeps insisting that Juliet marry him. Juliet finds it is no longer as difficult to refuse him as it once was.

Part 2, Letters 23-26 Summary

After reading Juliet’s chapters, Sidney writes to her, agreeing that her book lacks heart and suggesting that it should be about Elizabeth McKenna and her extraordinary life. In her answer, Juliet wholeheartedly agrees. With her newfound focus, she tells him that she has found Elizabeth’s sketches and portraits, many of which were of Kit as a baby. There is also one of Christian Hellman. When Juliet showed it to Amelia, Amelia explained that she had at first disapproved of Elizabeth’s relationship. Then Christian had come to Amelia’s house one night, expressed his intentions for Elizabeth, and left Amelia reassured. In another letter, Juliet tells Sidney she has gathered more stories of Elizabeth and Christian from Sam Withers, the cemetery’s groundskeeper, who tells her not only about seeing Elizabeth grow up as a child but also about her and Christian helping him dig graves during the Occupation. He mentions how, despite the circumstances, there had been more than one nice German soldier in his experience. Some showed sympathy and courageously defied orders to help the islanders by stealing medicine for their sick children.

Part 2, Letters 27-30 Summary

Juliet finally confesses to Sophie that she feels something for Dawsey and has ever since their first in-person meeting. They shared a moment the night before Dawsey’s departure to retrieve Remy from Louviers in which she thought he would perhaps express reciprocal feelings. They were interrupted, however, by Mark’s sudden arrival. He kissed her in front of Dawsey, who simply left after bidding Juliet goodnight. She forced Mark to stay at a hotel rather than with her, but in the vacuum of his and Dawsey’s absence, Juliet struggles to know which man she should pursue. The next day, she asks Amelia to look after Kit so that she can confront Mark. She later writes to Sophie that she has given Mark a resounding refusal of his proposal, especially after he took no interest in Kit. When he dismissed her relationship with Kit as being nothing more than her friends taking advantage of her by having her raise the child for them, she told him to get out and that she would never marry him. Though this does not necessarily mean she will spend her life with Dawsey, Juliet tells Sophie she is elated to be freed from Mark.

Part 2, Letters 1-30 Analysis

In this first grouping of Part 2, Shaffer and Barrows depict The Persisting Effects of War through its violent effects on the female body through women’s loss of bodily autonomy. Though other sections of this guide discuss the ethical compromises made by women for the sake of their and their families’ survival, the authors deliberately balance out this depiction by portraying the sexual objectification of other women whose agency was stripped away. Though the authors work toward Dispelling Historical Monoliths painting all German soldiers as evil by describing instances of kindness and benevolence during the Occupation, the experiences of the women who worked in the German brothel are unequivocally exploitative and harmful. As Henry Toussant writes to Juliet, “I do not believe those young ladies were there because they wanted to be. They were sent from the Occupied territories of Europe, same as the slave Todt workers. It could not have been nice work” (182). Though Henry does not speak with certainty, the authors nevertheless use this passage to refer to the system of sexual exploitation known as military or field brothels in the German army and what was known as the “comfort women” system in the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII. These were women who, having been captured in occupied territories, were sexually abused and exploited by the occupying force. Cases were not solely confined to Germany and Japan’s armies, since the Allied Forces were known to sexually exploit women as well. Though studies about these systems of sexual exploitation are still ongoing, analyses and accounts from survivors reveal common outcomes, wherein the women were left in deplorable living conditions, often beset with sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, and were heavily abused. Henry’s comparison of the brothel women to the Todt worker, therefore, is an apt one: The authors imply that much like the Todt enslaved workers, these women had no rights and were kept alive solely for their physical (in the women’s cases, specifically sexual) labor.

Unlike the Todt workers, however, the sexually exploited women’s hardships did not garner any sympathy. The authors demonstrate that even in the midst of war, any sign of a woman’s sexuality is grounds for violence, be it verbal or physical. Henry’s mother and aunt remain scornful of the women from the brothel after the war has ended. When the women die at sea, their response is: “Served them right, the whores” (183). Even in death, they stigmatize the women for their sexual activity, without knowing any of the circumstances that brought those women to Guernsey in the first place nor acknowledging that the sexual activities they engaged in were not consensual. Women who were involved with German soldiers remain ostracized and despised after the war has ended, regardless of whether their involvement was voluntary. The fact that the Guernsey residents themselves are stigmatized by people in England and elsewhere as collaborators demonstrates the way that wartime trauma sometimes manifests as horizontal violence toward others who suffered differently.

Furthermore, the revelation that Elizabeth was executed for protecting a girl who was being beaten for menstruating drives home the intensity of the misogyny at the heart of women’s suffering during war. As Remy notes in her letter, the sight of menstruation blood, a sign of a woman’s sexual maturity, justified physical retribution in the eyes of the concentration camp overseers: “The women who were menstruating just had to let the blood run down their legs. The overseers liked this, this oh so unsightly blood, it gave them the excuse to scream, to hit” (191). Shaffer and Barrows use this passage to convey how women’s sexualized bodies are often sites of incomprehensible violence. The overseers were not concerned about the hygienic issues of menstruation in a confined and overfilled space like the barracks. Rather, menstruation elicits a desire for violence and makes a woman’s body a site where violence can be inflicted without consequences. As Guernsey’s residents’ hatred of the sexually exploited women demonstrates, violence against a sexualized female body is not only tolerated but often celebrated. The social, physical, and psychological effects of that violence persist long past the end of the war, continuing to shape the lives and legacies of women like Remy and Elizabeth.