Virginia Woolf’s Lost Diary
In a note at the end of her novel, Stephanie Barron describes her fondness for writing fiction about historical and literary figures: "I have a habit of making things up, quite often about people who lived perfectly good lives of their own, people who would be furious to think they were the objects of my embellishment – Jane Austen, Queen Victoria, Virginia Woolf." As a reader, you are drawn into the plots of Barron's books, even though you are aware they are works of fiction.
In The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf, the reader is not only thrown into the life and times of Virginia Woolf, but also England's current literary world. We experience World War II, from Woolf's perspective, with spies and bombings and fast forward to today's world of rare books filled with Oxford and Cambridge Professors who will do anything to get their hands on undiscovered diaries and letters of literary figures.
Six decades after Woolf's death, Jo Bellamy arrives at Sissinghurst Castle in England. She is a landscape designer hired by a wealthy American businessman to reproduce the Castle's famous White Garden for his home. The White Garden was created by Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West. Jo is recovering from her grandfather's sudden and unexplained suicide and she begins to believe that her trip to England might have actually caused his death, since he worked at Sissinghurst as a teenager. With this on her mind, Jo stumbles across a dusty old notebook in a gardening shed. Is this really a lost diary describing Virginia Woolf's last days? This discovery leads Jo on a thrilling journey into the turbulent inner life of a literary icon.
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