Virginia Woolf and the Women Who Shaped Her Life, by Gillian Gill. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2019

I’ve read two or three biographies of Virginia Woolf, but this one went at telling her story from a very different angle than usual. Gill goes back in time, and tells us about Woolf’s female predecessors. The women aren’t just her foremothers; Gill includes Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who while not well known now showed Woolf that a woman could be a successful writer, her siblings including half –sister Laura, who got called an ‘idiot’ and was put away in an asylum when she was in her 20s. Of course, her family also included men. Most were good, but her two half-brothers were nasty characters who sexually abused both Virginia and her sister Vanessa- and possibly Laura and Stella. It’s odd that Gill stresses that it was the women who shaped Woolf’s life, when she and her siblings (and her mother, Julia) were shaped very strongly by the male-dominated times in general and their family in particular. Later, Woolf became part of the influential (in intellectual terms) Bloomsbury group. This group was composed of mainly gay and bi men who had little use for women, but changed their minds when it came to Virginia, and her sister Vanessa, who both married into the group. Woolf and her sister transformed the group; the group transformed the women. It was here that Woolf found her literary voice. 


Gill has a great enthusiasm for her subject. She sometimes writes in a breathless manner, as if she were a teenager writing about her heartthrob. It’s a somewhat odd choice of style, given how much scholarly research she put into the book, but it works. At times it’s like listening in on gossip; the Bloomsbury group seems to have put as much energy into their sex lives as they did into their art; a discussion of the grooming and marriage of Woolf’s niece to the former lover of the girl’s father is had. The only thing I found annoying was the author’s habit of jumping around in time- it made it even more difficult to sort out the large cast of characters. Four stars.

Shadow Daughter: A Memoir of Estrangement, by Harriet Brown. Da Capo Press, 2018

Harriet Brown admits she led a pretty good childhood; she was not physically abused (much), she had food and clothing, hers was not a broken home. But her mother was emotionally abusive, tearing Harriet down constantly. No one could praise Harriet without her mother cutting in, and telling them they didn’t know Harriet like she did, that Harriet was in fact a horrible child, self-centered and selfish. Harriet got out of the house as soon as she could, at 16, but it was hard to overcome the drive to stay close to her family. Our society says the family is important, and that you are screwed up if you aren’t close to them. Finally, she had enough, and severed ties with her mother, not just for her benefit but for that of her own daughters.



The author mixes her own story in with those of others, and with psychological research. This isn’t just her complaining; emotional abuse IS abuse, and it can scar a person for the rest of their life, causing them to not trust themselves. I have a couple of dear friends who have/had abusive mothers, and they have both had to cut off communications for the sake of their sanity.



She may have been five thousand miles away when her mother’s funeral took place, but it was for the best. The rest of the family wouldn’t have wanted her there, and it would have been hypocrisy for her to weep and wail. She had already wasted hours, days, weeks of her life trying to appease her mother, trying to get her approval. Now, approval and love would never come.



I think what I found even more chilling than her mother’s treatment of her was her father’s ignoring it. He said to the author that if he didn’t take her mother’s side, she would leave him. He picked his wife over his daughter. After her death, he said he did not want to hear from her for a long time. They are slowly rebuilding a relationship, with him learning to like her, to see her as she really is rather than through the lens of her mother’s hatred.



While there is some repetition in the book, it’s well written. I felt pain for what the author went through. I think this book is an important one for adult children of emotionally abusive parent’s to read.

See What I Have Done, by Sarah Schmidt. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017

 Most Americans are familiar with the kid’s rhyme “Lizzie Borden took an axe; and gave her mother forty whacks; When she saw what she had done; she gave her father forty-one”. Borden was a real person, and the murders of her father and step-mother were indeed the bloody result of multiple axe wounds. Lizzie was tried for the murders and acquitted, in large part because people back then couldn’t believe that a gentlewoman would do such a thing.

This fictionalized version of the tale starts with Lizzie yelling for the maid to come quickly, because someone had killed her father. Then we have a short recital from her older sister, Emma. From there we bounce back to the day before the murders; the different chapters are told by Lizzie, Emma, the maid Bridget, and Benjamin, a crude thug hired by their uncle to ‘do something’ to their father. The minutia of what happened that day, and the day of the murder, are seen from all points of view. From them we get lots and lots of back story, too. From them we also realize that Lizzie is most likely an unreliable narrator- very unreliable. I never did decide if she was mentally ill or just incredibly self-centered.

We are never given a rock solid case that Lizzie performed the murders, although it doesn’t look good for her. The things that made me wonder were the presence of the uncle (who seems to have a very unhealthy relationship with Lizzie, and perhaps Emma), and the thug for hire who was on the premises when the murders were done.

The most prominent thing about the book is the mood. The Borden household is claustrophobic in the extreme. The father is abusive, stingy, and a control freak. The step-mother tries, but ends up punching herself in the stomach repeatedly to vent her frustrations. Bridget the maid is normal; she just wants to earn enough money to get out of that household. Emma is a sympathetic character; she has been thwarted all her life, unable to do the things she wants, told by her mother to take care of Lizzie before she died. Lizzie is… horrible. Cruel to Emma and to her stepmother, she is almost out of touch with reality. The prose creates the hot, close atmosphere of the household, and it’s hard to take. I wanted to be away from those people; I can only imagine how much the Bordens wanted away from each other! Reading this is an immersive experience; the author describes the smells, the sounds of their bodies, the heat, the godawful food, in great detail. It’s not a pleasant read, but it is well done. Four stars out of five. 

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This did not influence my review.  

The Visitors, by Catherine Burns. Simon & Schuster, 2017

Fifty-ish Marion Zetland lives in a formerly fine house, now falling apart and filthy. Brought up by parents who considered her below contempt, her childhood was friendless and she was bullied both because of her weight and her slowness at learning things. Her brother was the shining light of the family, and she has spent her life deferring to him and being his servant. To say she’s mentally unhealthy would be putting it mildly. Brother John is no better; he never lived up to his childhood promise and spends most of his time in the basement, which is forbidden to Marion.

Marion has no hobbies or real interests; she soothes herself by eating, watching TV, and sleeping with her many stuffed animals. No one speaks to her (except on the rare occasion when someone wants something from her); it’s like she has been erased- or never existed at all. Meanwhile she knows something is going on in the basement- there is extra laundry for her to do, and she makes (horrible) meals for extra people.  And there are a few trips to ferry landing or bus station.. Then one day her brother has a heart attack, and is taken to the hospital. Now she must face what’s in the basement.

How Marion deals with her new freedom from John and her responsibility to the Visitors is both heartening and shocking. In the end I loathed Marion as much as I did John,

although I wondered how much responsibility could be laid at her door versus her parent’s.

The writing is very atmospheric. I could feel the claustrophobia in the falling down house, and the claustrophobic state of Marion’s own mind, always trying to efface herself and make people like her- or at least not denigrate her. It’s a very creepy book, although not what I thought it would be when I requested it. I expected supernatural horror; this was far more horrifying. 

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I received this book free from the Library Thing Early Reviewers program in return for an unbiased review. 

Neither of these things influenced my review.  

Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger. Scribner, 2009

Julia and Valentina are identical twins. They are the daughters of Edie, who was the twin sister of Elspeth, who has just died and left J & V her flat in London, along with a great deal of money. The catch is, they must spend a year living in the flat, and their parents must not be allowed into the flat. This sounds all right to J & V, who although technically adults, show no signs of maturity. They have dropped out of three colleges and do nothing more than exist. Actually, that’s not quite true; Valentina is interested in fashion design and enjoys sewing and upcycling used clothing. Julia, the bolder of the two, has no interest in anything, and as she’s the dominant one, nothing is largely what they do.

The building they come to live in has other tenants; on the top floor lives Martin, a victim of severe OCD and agoraphobia, whose wife has just left him, unable to deal with his rituals and towers of trash any longer. On the ground floor lives Robert, who was Elspeth’s lover. The building backs up to Highgate Cemetery, with the graves of many famous people as well as the crypt that contains Elspeth herself, and her family. This will be important later. The flat is also inhabited by Elspeth’s ghost- something she makes known after a while.

This is one creepy book- and some of the creepiness isn’t supernatural. The way Julia dominates Valentina, the reason for the rift between Edie and Elspeth, the relationship between Valentina and Robert and between Valentina and Elspeth- there is wrongness everywhere. And that created a problem for me: I couldn’t manage to really like any of the characters. Even ones who I felt sorry for at first turned out monstrous. As another reviewer said, Martin is the most human and likable person in the book- and his relationship with Julia is actually a good one.

It wasn’t hard to figure out what would happen after a certain point, but reading how it played out was still a creep fest. The author’s prose is lovely; even when I was disgusted with the people, the writing beckoned me on. Because of my dislike for the characters I can’t give it five stars, but it’s a very strong four, because very little horror really gives me the shivers. 

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- from Amazon, they will give me a few cents. This in now way influenced my review.