Stephanie Barron betrays Virginia Woolf

Having just finished this morning the novel "The White Garden" by Stephanie Barron, I can now understand why my mother never finished reading through Barron's Jane Austin Mystery series. The books, while somewhat lighthearted and enjoyable at times, lack all academic background, paint over the obvious, center around duller than dull and dumber than dumb characters and contain only occasional moments of insight into anything other than Ms. Barron's own dwindling imagination.

The portrait of Virginia Woolf (and her lover, Vita Sackville-West) is a cardboard cut out from "The Hours", running around like a paranoid little bird from one person to the next, demanding to be saved while attempting her own distruction. The character of Margaux, however, is the most interesting of all the characters--as a parody of a shrill feminist scholar, she actually does make a few things clear and helps the story along alright, but other than that, she's worthless, as is the rest of the lot who appear in the book. She stands for one of the many (incorrect) versions of Woolf's personal life floating about academia.

Modern writers, attempting to delve into the mind of a woman writer whose whole buisness was that of delving into the mind and it's failings, fail in their efforts because they only paint Virginia Woolf with one brush--she was always the mad woman in a long, heavy coat, chain smoking and talking to herself, never anything else. She did go through periods of bliss, you know. Vita was a wonderful influence in her life, as was Leonard. The three of them were very happy for some time, not that you would know it from Ms. Barron.

However, I'll probably keep a copy of the book, just for my collection of Woolfinalia.

JPC.