The Forgotten Women Who Inspired THE THREE LIVES OF ALIX ST PIERRE

New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of The Paris Seamstress , The Paris Orphan and The Paris Secret , Natasha Lester offers us a fascinating tale of another daring woman in THE THREE LIVES OF ALIX ST. PIERRE ( Grand Central/Forever; January 10, 2023 ). An orphan turned WWII spy turned fashion icon in Paris, Alix St. Pierre is an unforgettable name for an unforgettable woman.

Filled with schemes, romance, revenge, and the intrigue of international espionage, the novel expertly intersperses the savagery of war and the glamorous and golden age of French fashion. With special appearances by Rita Hayworth and Christian Dior!

She wrote this piece for us about the inspiration behind her book.

From “We Can Do It” to “It’s a Man’s World”

I’ve long wanted to write a novel about the way women were actively encouraged to work during WWII, how their contributions were valued and their work allowed them to gain more independence than they’d ever had. But then, after the war, everything changed.

If you look at the war office recruitment campaigns from the time, including the famous Rosie the Riveter “We Can Do It” posters, and the Marines advertisements exhorting women to “Be a Marine”, you can see that women were portrayed as strong, competent and useful. Then the men returned from the frontlines and governments began to run propaganda campaigns encouraging women to give up their jobs and stay at home because the men apparently needed work more than the women did. This cultural change was swift and brutal, and for several decades thereafter, magazines and newspapers were filled with advertisements showing women on their knees, serving their husbands breakfast in bed underneath slogans such as, “It’s a Man’s World”, as in a particularly egregious Van Heusen tie example.

How did women go from being able to join the marines and do anything to being down on their knees in a man’s world? And how did it feel to be the woman who was told she could do anything for four short years, but who was then told she could do very little for decades thereafter? That’s one of the questions I wanted to tackle in The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre, which follows the lives of several women in postwar France who are struggling to fit into a new world that just wants women to be invisible – or to stay at home.

The Women Behind the House of Christian Dior

But two other things also inspired the book. Did you know that almost all of the senior management positions at the House of Christian Dior in Paris in its first year of operations in 1947 were held by women? The directrices of sales, the studio, and the ateliers, as well as Dior’s assistant designer, and the premières of each workroom, were all women. Without those women, I don’t think Dior would have been the icon he was – and still is today. But nobody knows their names or that they even existed, let alone the fact that they were the talented team behind the man’s name. I wanted to resurrect them from the amnesia of history and show the world how integral they were to Dior’s success. 

There was one man in Dior’s management team, an American, who ran the publicity department. Rather than erasing a woman from the pages of history, as so often happens, I decided to erase a man. I made Dior’s publicity director into a woman named Alix St Pierre so I could explore just how this group of women were emblematic of the postwar time – overlooked and unappreciated and forgotten by history, but so crucial to making history. And I wanted to write about those gorgeous New Look gowns – of course! – and show how they were Dior’s way of letting women be seen in a world that wanted to overlook them.

Mary Bancroft and the Brave but Forgotten Italian Staffette

My final inspiration was a woman named Mary Bancroft. I was reading a research book as background for a different novel and I came across a mention of Mary – that she worked as a spy in Switzerland during WWII. I immediately wanted to know more. There were spies in neutral Switzerland during the war? And one of them was a woman?

Yes, there were spies in neutral Switzerland. The American Office of Strategic Services, a secret intelligence organization, set up a station in Bern in 1943. Mary Bancroft worked there as a secret agent. Of course she immediately became a character in the new book I was conjuring up, working alongside Alix St Pierre to do some quite extraordinary things.

I discovered that OSS Bern worked closely with the Italian partisans during the war. A little more research led me to the staffette – the Italian women who helped the partisans hiding in the mountains to fight against the Nazis. These women were incredibly courageous and are virtually unknown today. But without those women, the partisans wouldn’t have survived and been able to help the Allies on the path to victory. 

The staffette walked eighty kilometres every day, fed on nothing more than cabbage, carrying heavy packs of arms, ammunition and messages into the mountains, even through winter. As soon as the Nazis understood that these women were aiding the partisans, they began to arrest them. Many were tortured and killed. Despite their sacrifices and their bravery, after the war, the women of the staffette were not permitted to march alongside the men in the offical victory marches. How heartbreaking that must have been for them. 

That’s when I realised that The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre would be a book about how women grappled with facing a life that let them taste independence, but actually used them and then ignored them when all the men returned. And the Italian staffette, spy Mary Bancroft, Dior’s incredible team of women, and the fictional Alix would all help me to tell that story. I hope you enjoy it!

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Natasha Lester: worked as a marketing executive for L’Oreal before penning the New York Times and internationally bestselling novel The Paris Orphan . She is also the author of the USA Today bestseller The Paris Seamstress as well as several other historical fiction novels including The Riviera House , Her Mother’s Secret and A Kiss from Mr. Fitzgerald .

When she’s not writing, she loves collecting vintage fashion, traveling, reading, practicing yoga and playing with her three children. Natasha lives in Perth, Western Australia.

Connect with her on:

Website:  NatashaLester.com

The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre

An unforgettable and “fascinating tale” of an orphan turned WWII spy turned fashion icon in Paris (Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye).
Alix St. Pierre. An unforgettable name for an unforgettable woman. She grew up surrounded by Hollywood glamor, but, as an orphan, never truly felt part of that world. In 1943, with WWII raging and men headed overseas to fight, she lands a publicity job to recruit women into the workforce. Her skills—persuasion, daring, quick-witted under pressure—catch the attention of the U.S. government and she finds herself with an even bigger assignment: sent to Switzerland as a spy. Soon Alix is on the precipice of something big, very big. But how far can she trust her German informant…?After an Allied victory that didn’t come nearly soon enough, Alix moves to Paris, ready to immerse herself in a new position as director of publicity for the yet-to-be-launched House of Dior. In the glamorous halls of the French fashion house, she can nearly forget everything she lost and the dangerous secret she carries. But when a figure from the war reappears and threatens to destroy her future, Alix realizes that only she can right the wrongs of the past …and finally find justice.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing