Book reviews from efandrich

The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (Random House Reader's Circle)

by Stephanie Barron

I did enjoy the White Garden mainly because I had been to all of the locations mentioned in the novel and had actually met some of the characters: Adam Nicholson,(Vita's grandson, referred to as The Family in the novel) and Jack Vass ( the head gardener at Sissinghurst who helped to create the famous White Garden.) This is the wonderful aspect of the mystery. Barron really made me feel that I was back at Sissinghurst, Monk's House and Charleston. The novel is a literary caper involving a newly discovered Virginia Woolf manuscript that questions the circumstances of Virginia's death and gives a reason for the creation of the famous White Garden at Sissinghurst.. The book has the main characters running around Kent, Sussex, Oxbridge, and London trying to connect the dots and establish the authenticity of the little journal. In the process, they find another unpublished Woolf journal, an eyewitness account of the last sighting of Virginia, and the key to a puzzling poem by Vita. They establish a connection between Virginia and the infamous Cambridge Five.It is quite a lot to take in if the reader doesn't have more than a passing interest in the Bloomsburies. The tangled relationships (Keyes, Grant, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Vita and Harold Nicholson etc) can make a nonBloomsbury fan frustrated. Throw in Blunt and Burgess and the other Apostles and I can imagine a reader scratching his head trying to figure out the players are. But for the reader who can see the significance of the characters, it is delightful. Some of the deductions from the clues are strained, especially the original link to the Apostles and the ease with which the Monk's Hood garden could be dug up, but, with willing suspension of disbelief, it is a fun read. I've seen some reviews where the criticism is that Virginia or Leonard or Harold just wouldn't have acted that way True, this is not to be taken seriously....it is not literary biography or a scholarly analysis of Virginia's writing or Vita's poetry. It is on the same page as the many Austen sequels and the novels that cast Heminigway as an amateur sleuth. The fact that Virginia is a sacred icon of twentieth century literature does not mean that she must be out of bounds for this type of work. I suspect she would have thought it fun....she did have a wicked sense of humour