The Life She Was Given

The Life She Was Given by Ellen Marie Wiseman, published in 2017, is a historical fiction and mystery novel set in the United States in the 1930s and 1950s. The novel utilizes alternating perspectives to tell the stories of two women from the Blackwood family: Lilly Blackwood, a child with albinism who is sold to a circus by her mother, and Julia Blackwood, a young woman who returns to her family home to uncover family secrets and the truth about Lilly. The novel is narrated in the third-person omniscient point of view and explores themes such as Family Secrets and Their Impact on Identity, The Mistreatment of People With Physical Differences, and Resilience in the Face of Societal Stigma and Adversity.

This guide refers to the 2017 Kensington Books paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide discuss the exploitation and mistreatment of people with physical differences and disabilities, child abuse and neglect, alcohol abuse and addiction, sexual exploitation, and attempted sexual assault. The source material uses outdated, offensive terms for people with dwarfism throughout.

Plot Summary

The novel’s plot alternates between events in the 1930s and 1950s; this plot summary will instead follow chronological order.

In the 1930s, Lilly Blackwood is a young girl with albinism whose parents lock her in the attic for the first 10 years of her life. She has been made to feel like a monster and an abomination due to her skin color and told that the outside world would be scared of her. Lilly longs to experience the life beyond her attic. Lilly’s mother, Coralline, is a strict and deeply religious woman who does not show Lilly any affection and often forgets to bring her food and water. While Lilly’s father has been more loving and attentive, his sporadic visits and deference to Coralline’s wishes make Lilly feel alone and unwanted.

One night, Coralline wakes Lilly and tells her to get dressed. Though she has always yearned to leave the attic, Lilly is now scared to venture outside of her confines. She follows her mother through a maze of secret passages and out of the house to a traveling circus that has set up in the fields beyond Blackwood Manor. Once at the Barlow Brothers’ Circus, Coralline hands Lilly over to a man named Merrick, who is charge of the sideshow acts, in exchange for cash. A sideshow performer carries away a terrified Lilly, kicking and screaming.

A kind sideshow performer named Glory takes Lilly under her wing and helps her get cleaned up and acclimated to her new life, introducing her to the other performers and educating her about the norms of the circus. For the first time, Lilly sees herself in the mirror and realizes that she looks like a doll, not a monster, and that the name for her condition is albinism. She learns that her circus act in the sideshow tent will be called “Lilly the Ice Princess From Another Planet.”

The sideshow exhibits performers for local townspeople, who pay money to gawk and laugh at the “freaks.” During Lilly’s first sideshow performance, a group of teenagers terrorize her by throwing food and dog feces onto the stage. Glory promises to protect Lilly from this experience in the future. Lilly meets a young boy named Cole, who, along with his father, Hank, is in charge of the elephants. Lilly forms a special bond with Cole and the elephants, especially the young one named JoJo and his mother, Pepper.

Six years later, 15-year-old Lilly has a new act called “The Albino Medium,” where she is forced to trick customers into thinking she can commune with their dead loved ones. When her father unexpectedly visits her tent to apologize, Lilly ends her show early, and Merrick whips her because of it. Later, a belligerent man tears down her tent and exposes the fake act to other patrons, who demand their money back. To punish her, Merrick makes Lilly join a sexually explicit show; when she runs off stage, Merrick attempts to rape her but is stopped by Cole. Cole wants Lilly to join the elephant act because of her connection to the animals and as a way to keep her safe. When the two develop a romantic connection, he devises a plan for them to marry so that he can protect her. Her new act with the elephants, called “Lilly the Albino Princess From Siam,” features Pepper as a whitewashed elephant and is a huge success.

Lilly and Cole’s daughter, Phoebe, is 12 months old when a tornado rips through their performance in Oklahoma, destroying the tent. Circus owner Mr. Barlow decides to sell JoJo to another circus to make enough money to keep his circus afloat. When they try to separate Pepper and her child JoJo, Pepper kills Merrick, causing outrage among local leaders and townspeople. They demand that Pepper be killed for her actions. Lilly and Cole attempt to run away with Pepper but are caught. When Lilly intervenes to save Pepper during a public hanging, Lilly is thrown from the elephant’s back and impaled by a metal bar.

Lilly survives, is brought back to Blackwood Manor, and is locked in the attic once again. Lilly wakes in the attic, paralyzed from the waist down and demanding to see her daughter, but Coralline refuses. When her father allows her to see Phoebe, he apologizes for his involvement and tries to explain that Coralline’s neglect was brought on by religious shame. Lilly is locked in the attic until her death in 1940, when her daughter is two.

In 1956, Julia Blackwood steals food from a convenience store and washes herself in the store’s bathroom before getting ready for work. She is poor and hungry, barely able to scrape up enough money to cover her rent. At the diner where she works, a man arrives with a letter informing Julia that her mother died a year ago and that she has inherited the Blackwood Manor Horse Farm. Julia must now decide if she should return to the troubled home she ran away from three years prior.

Julia decides to return to her childhood home, where she meets the manager and groundskeeper, Claude, and the veterinarian who has been caring for the horses, Fletcher. She has memories of the house, where her father suffered from alcoholism and her mother was strict and demanding. Her mother blamed her for her father’s death three years prior, which is when Julia ran away. Julia is now determined to make a better life for herself. She gets acquainted with the horses and the business of running a farm. In her father’s study, a locked desk drawer with no key piques her interest. Eventually, she comes across a diary entry in her father’s notebook that states that he and Julia’s mother buried their firstborn and asks for God’s forgiveness. Julia is shocked by this news and determined to uncover the truth. She asks Claude for answers, as he has worked for the Blackwood family for over 20 years, but Claude is evasive.

Julia discovers a stack of newspaper clippings and circus ticket stubs in a hollowed-out book in her father’s study. The clippings show a circus performer in a bejeweled costume in a ring with elephants, and Julia wonders why her father would have these mementos. Later, she locates the key to the locked desk drawer and finds a camera inside with the name “Lilly” on the case. The photos reveal more pictures from the circus, including a picture of an elephant stuffed animal that she recognizes as her own childhood toy. Julia wonders who Lilly is and whether she is the firstborn child her father wrote about. When Julia finds secret passageways that lead to the attic, she is horrified to find a young girl’s bedroom and wonders if it is Lilly’s room.

While Julia oversees a burn pile in the yard, the flames grow out of control and engulf Blackwood Manor, destroying it. Claude finally confesses that he knows about Lilly and was there the night she was sold to the circus. He takes Julia to Lilly’s gravesite in the woods and reveals that Lilly is not Julia’s sister but is in fact her mother. Julia, whose real name is Phoebe, was raised by her grandparents.

Julia builds a new cottage and barn where Blackwood Manor once stood. Together with Fletcher and in honor of Lilly’s legacy, she rescues a dozen neglected foals who would otherwise be sold to auction or killed and abolishes the farm’s involvement in horse racing.