All She Ever Wanted was Vita
The White Garden by Stephanie Barron (Bantam, 2009)
Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo
A true historian is a detective. His or her joy derives from identifying loose threads while scouring recorded fact and accepted opinions. Best known for her charming mysteries featuring Jane Austen in the role of sleuth, author Stephanie Barron is, indeed, a historian with whom to be reckoned. Honing her skills while earning an undergraduate degree in history at Princeton and pursuing a graduate degree at Stanford, Barron then applied them to fiction.
Like legions of readers before her, from an early age Barron was drawn to Austen’s novels for the author’s wit and unpretentious commentary on the social milieu of her day. Barron sensed Austen’s interest in the then-infant art of detection. After reading the first Jane Austen mystery, Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (1996), readers will see the connection as inevitable, a natural extension of Austen’s keen perceptions. Other writers might quail at creating fiction around a beloved figure from the literary cannon but Barron persisted and received congratulatory reviews. Barron’s love for her subject is most apparent in the dialogue in the Austen series; clearly, she hears Austen’s voice as she writes.
In The White Garden, Barron chose to write about another cherished author, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), and her one-time lover Vita Sackville-West. The gap in historical fact sparking Barron’s narrative intrigues; a three-week period between when Leonard Woolf found his wife’s farewell note indicating her intention of committing suicide and the discovery of her body floating in the River Ouse. To fill the space Barron weaves a tangle of intricate pathways joining London, Oxford and Cambridge; Woolf, a secret Cambridge society founded in 1820 and a Nazi spy; and 21-st century landscape designer Jo Bellamy, Bellamy’s grandfather and Sackville-West’s White Garden.
Barron narrates her story through chapters alternating from the present day to the weeks after Woolf’s supposed departure from her home in the Sussex village of Rodmell, Monk’s House. Dated March 24, 1941, Woolf’s final diary entry yields no insights into her plans, yet she left Monk’s House four days later. No one has traced her steps, but her walking stick was found on the bank of the river. On April 18, Woolf’s drowned body surfaced in the river. As World War II progressed and she completed work on her last novel, Between the Acts, Woolf became more remote and depressed. As Woolf had a history of breakdowns and suicide attempts, the first resulting from her mother’s 1895 death, those who knew her believed that Woolf had, at last, accomplished her objective.
More than half a century later, Bellamy arrives at Sissinghurst Castle, the home of novelist and avid gardener Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson. Charged by a wealthy client to recreate Sissinghurst’s White Garden at his Long Island retreat, Bellamy has her own stake in Sissinghurst’s history; like Woolf, her grandfather, who grew up in Kent and worked at Sackville-West’s childhood home at knole and later at the castle, committed suicide. Her grandfather’s death just after Bellamy told him of her trip to Sissinghurst leaves her with a heavy weight of guilt. Again, Barron forms a question that fuels a page-turning plot: What happened in 1941 at Sissinghurst that might haunt a man as he established a new life in America?
Readers familiar with Woolf’s novels, her place among Bloomsbury notables and the groups’ profound impact on the arts will, likely, savor Barron’s recreation of the era. From Woolf’s sister, artist Vanessa Bell, and her husband, Clive Bell, to Vanessa’s lover Duncan Grant and economist John Maynard Keynes, Bloomsbury members appear on the pages of Barron’s novel not as ghosts, but alive with all of the power they wielded during the first half of the twentieth century. Scholars, rare book collectors, writers and gardeners will find much to delight in Barron’s novel, particularly a rapacious professor of feminist literature at Magdalen College, Oxford; a rare-book expert at Sotheby’s with insight into auction house shenanigans; references to Woolf’s novels, diaries and letters; and lovely descriptions of the White Garden. Quotations from, for example, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) and Sackville-West’s gardening columns in the London Observer; and multiple meanings of the word “screed” possibly affecting the tale’s conclusion make The White Garden a treasure trove for armchair detectives. One caveat: Immersed in the sounds and sights of Woolf’s world, readers may find the dialogue of contemporary characters a bit clumsy.
Nevertheless, The White Garden will appeal to a broader audience soon invested in Bellamy’s personal struggles: deep sadness at her grandfather’s death, resistance to her powerful client’s amorous overtures, and search for love while maintaining her independence. As such, Bellamy and Woolf share a desire for freedom in its many manifestations. In Barron’s vision, the desparing Woolf sought life. Just as, in her tower room at Sissinghurst, Sackville-West dreamed of growing a garden as war threatened her paradise. In light of this vision, it seems quite plausible that, rather than walk into the river, Woolf might have fled to her friend, Vita, whose name in Latin means “life.” Barron portrays a woman uncertain of her intentions as she leaves the man who so minutely managed her life:
“Later, in her fur coat and galoshes, her walking stick in one hand, she traversed the drowned meadows to the river.
A bird was perched on a fence-post, not ten feet away, trilling despite the bombs: Life! Life! Life!“
