The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf by Barron Stephanie

Author:Barron, Stephanie [Barron, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Mystery
ISBN: 9780553906844
Google: sZ3N8mVmpeQC
Amazon: B002PYFW34
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2009-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

MARGAUX STRAND’S HEELS CLICKED FURIOUSLY across the paving stones of the King’s College quadrangle. There was a don at King’s she badly wanted to consult named Nadia Fenslow, who’d gone antifeminist and now made a career of celebrating the distinguished males who crowded the English canon in a slavish sort of neo-lit conservatism. Margaux had hoped she might be available, might remember the boozy lunch they had shared during last year’s MLA conference. Nadia of all people would be up to her eyeballs in Apostles, swooning over E. M. Forster in a way that turned Margaux’s stomach, or suggesting that Woolf was but a pale shadow to Lytton Strachey, who’d probably taught Virginia how to spell when she was just a little thing in white muslin. Nadia might have a notion what Apostles Screed meant. Only Nadia was in Reykjavik until the start of Hilary term, and the don who’d borrowed her office had smirked at Margaux as though she were Nadia’s long-lost lesbian lover.

Margaux was seething.

Somewhere a bell tolled three o’clock. She was aware of an insistent curl of hunger in the pit of her stomach, ignored out of long dieting habit. What she wanted was a good glass of Bordeaux and a bit of cheese, possibly some biscuits, with a clever partner to gaze at her over candlelight. She needed somebody who understood her vocabulary and caught her references and knew where to look for the missing half of Woolf’s notebook without demanding to share the limelight. That was the essential difficulty in Margaux’s world at the moment: She had been sharing too much for too long. Other people’s triumphs, for instance. Other people’s credit. She’d contributed modestly to an article chiefly written by someone else, or shored up the course load of those too distinguished to be bothered with students anymore. She’d scrambled for a few crumbs of the Oxford pie to savor all by herself. At this point in her career, Margaux had reached the point she thought of as Lady Macbeth’s Choice: Crush all obstacles in her path to power, or exit stage right, on maternity leave. Having jettisoned Peter, the latter choice was probably out for the nonce. Single motherhood was far too impoverishing.

Peter had looked quite forlorn, poor poppet, she decided fondly—trailing into her rooms with that regrettable American in her corduroy trousers, staring at Margaux with the eyes of a wounded hound, and handing her the means of being feared and envied for the rest of her literary days. Peter was too endearing; a failure in his own right, of course, but endlessly devoted. It was comforting to have a Peter in one’s past. Just as it had been essential to leave him behind.

Margaux lurched suddenly as her stiletto caught between two paving stones. She cursed explosively. Across the quadrangle, a startled undergraduate turned his head. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen. They were such children these days.

She balanced precariously on one foot, wrenched the other out of its granite vise, and swore again as she glimpsed the heel.

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