Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

“Hang on to your hats, it’s a joy”, Jane Gardam, author of Old Filth Playful, intelligent fiction from acclaimed novelist to icon Woolf: “Wickedly smart, funny and fearless, plus that rarest of all things, genuinely surprising” Patrick Ness
A welcome treat for Virginia Woolf fans and for new readers: engaging, fun and easy to read, set in New York, London and Istanbul. Praise for Maggie Gee
‘A wise and beautiful book about what it feels like to be alive.’ Zadie Smith
‘Fast-moving, energetic, constantly surprising”’ Hilary Mante
‘Worldly, witty, enjoyable, impressive.’ Doris Lessing
‘Maggie Gee has never written better’ Rose Tremain
‘Excellent … Exciting stuff.” Fay Weldon
‘A tour de force – brilliantly structured, surprising, humane, and suspenseful” Elaine Showalter
‘Gripping, original and highly entertaining – Maggie Gee at her superb best.’ J G Ballard
‘So rich it is almost aromatic … impressive and important.’ Nigella Lawson
Indie book stores and literary landscape are key in novel. Compares the values and practices of early 20th century bookland – writing, publishing and bookselling - to those of the early 21st and the competition between print works and the digital, the material world and the electronic one (Woolf, a writer and publisher, cannot find a fountain pen for sale on Fifth Avenue; the book stores are full of sales she is stunned and thrilled by racial, sexual, and gender equality, but disturbed by things that ‘can’t be said’). Woolf’s solution - storytelling itself will never stop.
Love-letter to Virginia Woolf from another novelist - being her intimate friend, putting up with her eccentricities and snobberies and also seeing fabulous places - New York, London and Istanbul – though her eyes.
21st century women writers still look up to Woolf as the boldest and most original novelist – she did many things that no women writers have done before. Her essay ‘Professions for women’, says women still cannot write about as freely as men on ‘the body’ {sex} –one area where 21st century women can express themselves where Woolf could not. Woolf in real life was abused by her stepbrothers, which probably stopped her enjoying sex with men. Gee’s resurrected Woolf is no longer traumatised and can enjoy sex with whomever she wants, and Gee can enjoy the 21st century freedom to write it.
One of few novels on Virginia Woolf, with contemporary setting. Most current works are biographical on Virginia and Bloomsbury set. Will appeal to fans of Cunningham’s The Hours, Priya Parmar’s Vanessa and her Sister Three generations of women – Woolf, middle-aged, Angela, modern bestselling author and her teenage daughter Gerda, inspired by the heroine of Hans Andersen’s The Snow Queen. Readers who like thought experiments - what would happen if a famous person from 100 years ago came back to life in the present day?
Screenplay in development by Emmy Award winner Andrew Davies (Pride and Prejudice - A&E/Disney, Little Dorrit, Northanger Abbey, Emma , Middlemarch, War & Peace, Vanity Fair, Tipping the Velvet, Brideshead Revisited, Bleak House- BBC PBS Masterpiece; House of Cards -BBC/HBO)
Audience: New and literary fiction enthusiasts, LGBT, readers of Woolf and women’s writing, time travel fans, comedy and satire, feminists, readers who, like Woolf, have struggled through depressive illness; those are troubled by the suicides of writers like Woolf, Plath and Sexton, readers interested in creative writing and motherhood, creative writing MFAs.