When a woman soars

"Independence is freedom, and freedom is the only way for a woman to soar."

Spoken by Arlette in A Promise to Arlette by Serena Burdick

The above line found early in Serena Burdick's terrific 2025 novel A Promise to Arlette sounds like something contemporary feminists might say to one another, but this book covers a period from the 1930s to 1952. The novel disproves that line.

Ida Whipple is an American housewife with two children as the story opens in 1952. At a party a neighbor displays what purports to be a Man Ray photograph showing two nude women. Ida knows immediately that it is not actually a Man Ray photograph. She knows this because she is one of the women in the photograph.

That night Ida leaves her family, steals the photograph and heads across the country to California to try to find Man Ray. A few days later, after getting a clue about where she might be, Sidney, her husband, follows her to California, their two little girls in tow.

Most of the novel is a flashback. Ida seeks her independence by abandoning her family in England when in her teens and heading for Paris. Arlette becomes her new friend, a beautiful young Jewish woman who works for Peggy Guggenheim, the famous art patron and another Jew. When war breaks out and the Germans invade France, Peggy escapes, but Ida and Arlette remain in a chateau. When Arlette is captured, Ida assumes she has been taken to a camp and exterminated. Unable to leave France, she stays at the chateau under an assumed name. Then comes Sidney Whipple, an American paratrooper, who finds his way to that chateau and stays there, abandoning the war after falling in love with Ida.

What is the promise made to Arlette? Burdick saves the answer until near the end, giving the novel a powerful conclusion. Ida has twice abandoned her family, without ever truly finding independence or freedom. She soars, however, when the family she loves finds her.