Virginia Woolf in Manhattan
Maggie Gee
Language: English
Pages: 476
ISBN: 1846591880
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
What if Virginia Woolf came back to life in the twenty-first century?
Bestselling author Angela Lamb is going through a mid-life crisis. She dumps her irrepressible daughter Gerda at boarding school and flies to New York to pursue her passion for Woolf, whose manuscripts are held in a private collection.
When a bedraggled Virginia Woolf herself materialises among the bookshelves and is promptly evicted, Angela, stunned, rushes after her on to the streets of Manhattan. Soon she is chaperoning her troublesome heroine as Virginia tries to understand the internet and scams bookshops with 'rare signed editions'. Then Virginia insists on flying with Angela to Istanbul, where she is surprised by love and steals the show at an international conference on - Virginia Woolf.
Meanwhile, Gerda, ignored by her mother for days, has escaped from school and set off in hot pursuit.
Virginia Woolf in Manhattan is a witty and profound novel about female rivalry, friendships, mothers and daughters, and the miraculous possibilities of a second chance at life.
No, she’s … No. Yes, the cafe. Yes, yes.’ He carried us over the awkwardness. ‘Jimmy didn’t come with me, on this occasion, but we love Ida’s, we always go.’ I felt obscurely cheated, though, as if he’d taken something away from me, and started laying into the wine. He wasn’t even paying! We were going Dutch! I hadn’t forgotten the conference next day, but by the time we left, I was no longer sober. It was twelve o’clock. Virginia must be back. Prodded by the same unsatisfied desire for some
She makes theatre in a private house. She is bodiless. Physically, she ‘fails’ her husband – the suggestion is, she doesn’t like sex – sex with a man, in any case. ‘It’s tempting to see her creator like this. How many of you, consciously or not, have superimposed Virginia’s face on Mrs Dalloway’s privileged body? When she sets out to shop, did you see Virginia? That elegant neck and long delicate nose?’ A little laughter, a few nods, but I certainly had a long way to go. I had to dig deep
The most famous woman writer of the last century, she’s brilliant, I’ve always admired her, she’s said to be a snob but she’s beautiful and clever and her face is all over twentieth-century university literature courses, as you will find if you decide to do one. I don’t really know what to say about her except every sentence she writes is poetry! But she went mad and killed herself. I am shorthanding, of course. (She made Woolf sound like a total mong. The writer who I love at the moment is Kurt
shan’t have me! She said ‘Virginia?’ and I was off like a hare. There were red ropes, I went the wrong way, a man in uniform stopped me & asked to look at ‘those books’, I had two of my own & he looked at me hard and said ‘Ma’am, are these from the library?’ – but I said ‘No’ & rushed on, with her after me. And then – ANGELA Half of me was laughing, half of me was shivering, nothing like this had ever happened, not to me. But I couldn’t let her go. It was brilliant; it was impossible; it was
point.) ANGELA ‘Have I tired you out, Virginia?’ ‘Certainly not!’ She struck out towards the arch more energetically than before. VIRGINIA We walked over the gate’s massive threshold, a great metal sill, burnished in the middle to dazzling smoothness by the endless passage of the little people, their shoes humbly passing and polishing. Thousands of shadows of the living and the dead. We are cotton-fluff: dandelion; we blow on the wind. Aya Sophia glowed into view, its central dome like an