What She Left Behind: A Haunting and Heartbreaking Story of 1920s Historical Fiction

Ellen Marie Wiseman

Dec 2013 · Kensington Books

About this ebook

Half a million copies sold!
 
The breakout novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan Collector, What She Left Behind weaves together riveting stories of past and present, exploring the strength of women in two different times as they face adversity in two very different ways. Go inside the horrifying walls of a 1920s New York asylum as a wrongly imprisoned woman fights for what is most important to her—and meet the young woman confronting the pain and mystery of her own family’s mental illness two generations later.
 
Ten years ago, Izzy Stone’s mother fatally shot her father while he slept. Devastated by her mother’s apparent insanity, Izzy, now seventeen, refuses to visit her in prison. But her new foster parents, employees at the local museum, have enlisted Izzy’s help in cataloging items at a long-shuttered state asylum. There, amid piles of abandoned belongings, Izzy discovers a stack of unopened letters, a decades-old journal, and a window into her own past. 
 
Young flapper and suffragette Clara Cartwright is caught between her overbearing parents and her desire to be a modern woman.  Furious when she rejects an arranged marriage, instead finding love with an Italian Immigrant, Clara’s father sends her to a genteel home for nervous invalids. But when his fortune is lost in the stock market crash of 1929, he can no longer afford her care—and Clara is committed to the public asylum.
 
Even as Izzy deals with the challenges of yet another new beginning, Clara’s story keeps drawing her into the past. If Clara was never really mentally ill, could something else explain her own mother’s violent act? Piecing together Clara’s fate compels Izzy to re-examine her own choices—with shocking and unexpected results.
 
“Screams with authenticity, depth, and understanding.”
—The New York Journal of Books
 
“A real page turner…will appeal to all readers of fiction.”
—The Historical Novels Review
 
“Amazing…A great read!”
—The San Francisco Book Review
 
“Will both haunt and inspire you… a moving, and at times chilling story that totally endears you to her characters.”
—SpaWeek
 
“A great coming-of-age story.”
—School Library Journal
 

Ratings and reviews

I enjoyed the book. She was descriptive enough with the characters that I felt that I knew her. All the characters that surrounded her however we're two dimensional. I found the book to have a few discrepancies as well as some contradictions. While the discrepancies were explained in the acknowledgments section of the book, I found them to be a distraction from the story

I read about about one book every week, so I read a lot. Let me tell you this book is best I've read in a long time! Amazing story so brilliantly written I found I got emotional for the characters, it had surprising twists just when you think you can predict what's going to happen. It was such an easy read as well. The author did a fantastic job!👍

The dual stories of Clara and Izzy separated by, then merged, over decades were very effective. Loved the characters, and I could relate to their emotions, even though I have never experienced anything they were going through. Wonderful book.

About the author

Ellen Marie Wiseman is the New York Times bestselling author of the highly acclaimed historical fiction novels The Orphan Collector, What She Left Behind, The Plum Tree, Coal River and The Life She Was Given. Born and raised in Three Mile Bay, a tiny hamlet in northern New York, she’s a first-generation German American who discovered her love of reading and writing while attending first grade in one of the last one-room schoolhouses in New York State. Since then, her novels have been published worldwide, translated into twenty languages, and named to “Best Of” lists by Reading Group Choices, Good Housekeeping, Goodreads, The Historical Novel Society, Great Group Reads, and more. A mother of two, Ellen lives on the shores of Lake Ontario with her husband and dog. Visit her online at EllenMarieWiseman.com.