51 pages • 1-hour read
The Story She Left Behind
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Themes
Artistic Creation as a Form of Self-Expression and Self-Discovery
In The Story She Left Behind, Henry portrays artistic creation as a vital pathway for the characters to understand themselves and the world around them. Bronwyn’s, Clara’s, and Callum’s artwork, in particular, has helped them make sense of their internal and external experiences. These characters have used writing, painting, and invention to feel more grounded in themselves; the world hasn’t accepted them or offered them what they needed, but art has. Bronwyn invented words and stories to create worlds that were truer to her psychological experience—these worlds offered her comfort when her family and friends actively alienated her. While the words “we use [a]re made for the people who [don’t] notice the world,” her words are “for things that people like her […] notice” (51). She used language and storytelling to invent a safe space for herself. Meanwhile, Clara has turned to visual art in the wake of her mother’s disappearance, at the end of her marriage, and throughout her own mothering experience. Painting is a form of relaxation and a sense-making mechanism. Callum also found solace in writing; the practice let him record his past experiences and make sense of them. His artistic passions cross over with Clara’s and Bronwyn’s and grant them new forms of personal connection.
Clara’s creative process allows her to articulate feelings that she cannot put into words, grounding her in both imaginative expression and emotional truth. The novel delves into these explorations via Clara’s character. As a painter, illustrator, and art teacher, Clara tries to capture the ineffable facets of her emotional experience in images. Whenever she finds “[her]self in the sunroom with [her] easel and watercolors” (56), her tangible troubles dissipate, and she finds the space to process her feelings freely. At times, Clara’s paintings are of entirely imaginary worlds; she will, for example, attempt to paint an indescribable feeling when she doesn’t have the language to articulate it in conversation. At other times, she will paint familiar images to capture a place’s effect on her psyche.
No matter the inspiring intent, Clara’s painting grounds her in her sense of self. This is why she longs for her easel and paints when she’s away in London and Cumbria. She experiences new feelings (surrounding both Bronwyn and Charlie) and needs her supplies to reify these feelings in art. When she can’t paint, she feels restless and alone, but when she returns to her work, she feels more at peace with her emotional journey. Her experience captures the novel’s overarching thesis about artistic creation—depicting “[t]he creative act as discovery, a quest for oneself” (248). Art grants the characters access to the mysteries of the natural world and their interiors. Artistic creation, the novel shows, helps the characters survive hardship, overcome personal trauma, and make beauty out of pain.
The Impact of the Past on the Present
The novel demonstrates how the traumas of the past, particularly from childhood, continue to shape one’s identity, relationships, and emotional experience in the present. Twenty-five years after her mother Bronwyn disappears, Clara is still preoccupied with her fate—an emotional dynamic that conveys how the unresolved past impacts her life long after the original wound has occurred. Even before Charlie contacts Clara about finding Bronwyn’s missing leather satchel, her mother’s absence consumes Clara. Every part of her life is tinged with reminders of her lost mother and questions surrounding her story. Clara lives in the house where she grew up—the same house where she lived with Bronwyn and from which Bronwyn disappeared. Thus, constant reminders of her mother surround her; Bronwyn’s ghost stalks this setting and influences how Clara sees herself as a woman and a mother. Then, when she gets the “phone call from across the sea” (40), her fixation on the past returns in full force. For example, when she takes out the “books, articles, papers, and […] pages” that she collected about her mother years prior (40), Clara is excavating physical representations of her past. Clara hasn’t let go of these artifacts because she hasn’t let go of her mother. When she sets out on her journey to find clues to Bronwyn’s fate in England, she physically journeys into the past. Her quest for answers is a quest to resolve her childhood trauma.
Only through directly confronting her experience can Clara disentangle herself from the emotional weight of the past and live more freely in the current moment. Once she begins to confront the pain and abandonment that she experienced as a child, she can begin to heal and remake her life and identity in the present. Ever since Bronwyn disappeared, Clara has felt that “[n]othing exist[s] alone; it always tangle[s] with something in the past” (123). This remains true throughout Clara’s search for answers and a resolution. When she’s overseas, she sees herself neglecting her daughter’s needs and is reminded of Bronwyn’s failure to attend to her needs. When she’s at the Cumbria house, she is reminded of her mother’s stories and words. Clara’s lived and remembered experiences overlap in these ways because Clara is still trying to understand how her past has dictated her life in the present.
Clara’s eventual emotional breakthrough with Bronwyn marks a turning point in her emotional healing. When Clara reunites with Bronwyn and confronts her about her abandonment, she takes the first step to processing the past. She owns her hurt so that she can let go of it. Her conversations with Bronwyn throughout the novel’s latter chapters also usher her toward healing. By the novel’s end, Clara ultimately finds peace of mind. The image of her standing outside and studying the landscape conveys this new sense of calm and resolve: “I was so very quiet, everything in me hushed and still. […] I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I was not rushing toward the next thing” (322). The image of her standing still is a metaphor for her newfound security in the present. Now that she’s resolved her past, she can engage with life in the moment.
The Indelible Bonds Between Mothers and Daughters
Clara and Bronwyn’s and Clara and Wynnie’s intimate relationships convey the power of maternal relationships. In particular, they underscore the unbreakable emotional ties between the mothers and daughters—bonds that continually shape identity, transcend time, and impact generations. When Clara was a child, she and Bronwyn shared an ineffable bond. Clara was enchanted by her mother’s stories and imagination, and Bronwyn felt enlivened by Clara’s youthful energy and promise. In the narrative present, Clara tries to recreate and preserve the positive aspects of her relationship with Bronwyn in her relationship with Wynnie. She is determined to never abandon or disappoint Wynnie the way Bronwyn did her, but she also wants the sort of magical connection with her daughter that she always felt with her mother. The interplay of these two relationships conveys how interpersonal dynamics are passed from one generation to the next; these mother-daughter bonds particularly transcend the bounds of time and space.
Even in physical absence, Bronwyn’s lingering presence haunts and shapes Clara’s life, illustrating how mother-daughter relationships persist after a long separation. Clara’s continued attachment to Bronwyn in the narrative present reiterates the indelible nature of her connection with her mother. Decades have passed since Bronwyn disappeared and left Clara without answers. However, Clara still thinks about her mother at almost every moment. She appears to Clara every day:
It might be in a turn of phrase I used, or in the song of the rising tide behind our house, in my daughter’s creative energy as she gathered moss for a fairy house, or in the clues and messages my mother taught me to look for in the natural world (3).
No matter whether she is consciously thinking about Bronwyn, Clara’s mother continues to influence her in heart and mind. Even though Clara tells herself that her mothering and artistic creation exist independently from Bronwyn, their unresolved mother-daughter relationship influences her whole life. Therefore, when she and Bronwyn reunite in Chapter 46, Clara can finally make sense of who she and Bronwyn are to one another. Being together in the present offers them the chance to heal their past dynamic and establish a healthier one in the present. At the same time, this reunion offers Bronwyn the chance to explain herself to Clara. Clara has felt abandoned by her, but Bronwyn left her to protect her. She has also remained spiritually connected to Clara throughout the years. Their love transcends physical, geographical, and temporal obstacles, as they’ve been attuned to each other in soul for 25 years. Their sustained and mysterious connection captures the ineffability of mother-daughter connections.
Through Clara’s devotion to Wynnie, she demonstrates an intentional effort to break the maternal abandonment she experienced as a young child and display unconditional maternal love toward her daughter. Clara’s care for Wynnie captures her desperation to give Wynnie what Bronwyn couldn’t give to her. Clara is still surprised “that [Wynnie] came at all; her life [is] miracle enough for [Clara],” and she tells Wynnie “this all the time—she [is her] miraculum” (19). For Clara, Wynnie is a form of redemption. She offers Clara the love that she didn’t have from Bronwyn and gives her the chance to turn her hurt into joy.
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