Just about every media reference to Ida and Louise Cook describes them as “unlikely heroines.” The two World War II-era women’s lives are highlighted in a new novel by Astoria author Marianne Monson.

Monson delights in historical fiction, has taught at Clatsop Community College and is the president of the Writer’s Guild, an Astoria-based support group and training forum.

Her just-published work, “The Opera Sisters,” tells the story of the two British women whose fascination with opera became a cover for helping persecuted Jews escape Germany and Austria.

Many of Monson’s works have been about women’s achievements, including “Frontier Grit,” about unlikely pioneers, and “Women of the Blue and Gray,” which showcased Civil War “mothers, medics, soldiers and spies.”

Monson’s longtime book editor sent her an article about the Cooks just as she was considering a World War II story. Her grandfather had served with the 10th Mountain Division, a U.S. Army outfit modeled on Norwegian ski patrols that saw action in the Italian Alps, while her grandmother was an inspector in a U.S. ammunition factory.

“I have been wanting to write a World War II book for a while because of that family connection to the era,” she said. “But it is written about so much. I wanted it to be a different angle.”

The Cook sisters were in their early 30s and had stable but low-paying government office jobs in London. Ida was about to begin a magazine and romance novel-writing career under the pen name of Mary Burchell. (“Ida’s scribbles,” the family calls them.)

World War I battlefield and influenza epidemic losses had decimated the male population, so with real-life romance seeming unlikely, their passion became opera.

The sisters have been described as “opera groupies” by their nephew, John Cook. They saved money by being frugal, then spent long hours in ticket queues. They cultivated friendships with opera stars of the 1930s, snapping their photos at the stage door, writing fan letters and meeting them backstage seeking autographs. Often they were invited to social gatherings, cementing friendships that would last for decades.

That led them to Austrian conductor Clemens Krauss and his Romanian-born wife, soprano Viorica Ursuleac. Historians have noted that Krauss was favored by Hitler, although he would be exonerated of collaboration during the Nuremberg Trials.

They sought to save the musicians they worked alongside, while Hitler’s regime denied artistic and business opportunities to Jews and even rewrote classical works to omit Hebrew words from Handel and Mozart librettos.

One passage by Monson captures the manner in which Ida, having learned about the plight of the Jews, is asked whether she will help. She swallowed hard against her fear. “How do you do it?”

“Do what, dear?” Viorica asked. “How do you pretend like the music even matters anymore?” The light of understanding lit up her face. “In some ways, it matters less,” Viorica said simply. “But in some ways, it matters more than ever.”

Krauss began scheduling operas to coincide with the sisters’ visits, to conceal their planned meetings with potential refugees. When they traveled to Europe, the sisters would meet with Jewish families, take possession of their expensive jewelry and fur coats, and wear them openly on their return to England.

Using embroidery stitches taught by their mother, they carefully hand-sewed British labels inside the borrowed coats to outfox German customs inspectors, who they distracted with chocolate. At home, they recruited guarantors to sponsor Jewish families. Ida even quit her job to focus on their campaign.

Monson imagines the British women’s lives while weaving in passages describing historical details about England and Germany in the lead-up to the outbreak of war in 1939. Monson calls these episodes “prose poems.”

One depicts a pro-Nazi rally in the United States. Others describe Picasso’s “Guernica,” a reaction to the brutality of the Spanish Civil War, Hitler’s rise to power, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the fascist leader.

Monson’s telling of the reaction of the Cook sisters’ father reflected a divided nation. “What did I tell you? Hitler doesn’t want war any more than we do,” he said. But Winston Churchill, not then in power, warned war was inevitable — and was proved right in less than a year.

She describes Londoners’ wartime lives in detail with a matter-of-factness that many Britons of that generation used when they spoke of it. Eventually, the tide turned, culminating in the 1945 German surrender and the eventual Victory in Europe Day. Monson’s finale, which has an operatic flavor, is a surprise.

To research the story, Monson planned a trip in 2020 to delve into archival records and visit the European opera houses and British homes where the Cooks had lived.

While enduring an ever-changing tangle of regulations, European authorities granted Monson permission to travel. Many archives were closed, but she attended an opera in Vienna, viewed the Dachau concentration camp site near Munich and saw the preserved Churchill War Rooms in London. She was also welcomed inside the Cooks’ former home by its gracious occupant.

After the war, Ida continued writing. Some of her more than 100 books featured operatic themes. She wrote an autobiography in 1956 called “We Followed Our Stars,” an expanded version was published in 2008 as “Safe Passage.” In a September talk, Monson said Ida’s chronology appeared jumbled. “There are clearly places where she is obscuring the truth,” she said.

The sisters always maintained that they helped only 29 people. They were honored by the Israeli Holocaust remembrance group Yad Vashem in 1964 and by the British government in 2010.

Ida died in 1986 and Louise in 1991. Although their adult lives were spent in London, the two spent their early years in Sunderland, a working-class community on Britain’s northeast coast. Leaders there erected a plaque in 2017 marking their achievements — a location Monson visited during her research.

Now that “The Opera Sisters” is completed after three years’ work, Monson is eager to pursue her next project, collaborating on a young readers’ book about the civil war in Guatemala.

She hopes that as well as enjoying a compelling story of heroism, readers will recognize disturbing parallels of authoritarianism in the present-day.

“As I was working, I was struck by how much the same arguments appear about immigration and some fears and concerns, populist leaders, raging inflation,” she said. “One of the great things about spending time on history, you realize what has happened before.”

Quote: Marianne Monson, author of ‘The Opera Sisters’

“They were incredible women who used their profound gift for love to help people during one of the world’s darkest eras.”