"The Quest for Her Story: Vanessa & Virginia (Susan Sellers) as Metaphysical Detective Story"
(2011) Bloomsbury Adaptations — Location: Bath Spa University (UK) (5.May.2011)
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- Abstract
- This paper aims to examine Susan Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia (2008) as a metaphysical detective story in which Vanessa Bell, the narrator, endeavours to pierce the mystery of her dead sister Virginia Woolf and the enigma that enshrouded their relationship. Subtly mixing fact and fiction as the painter Vanessa and the novelist Virginia might have done in their respective Bloomsbury art, Sellers’s novel is a quest whose ending – if there is any ending at all – appears not to be as clear-cut as it may sound at first. Using Patricia Merivale’s and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s seminal work Detecting Texts. The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (1999) as theoretical background, this paper will apply specific themes of metaphysical detective fiction to Vanessa and Virginia, such as, for instance, “the defeated sleuth, whether he be an armchair detective or a private eye; [...] the purloined letter; [...] the ambiguity, ubiquity, eerie meaningfulness, or sheer meaninglessness of clues and evidence; [...] the missing person, [...] the double, and the lost, stolen, or exchanged identity; [...] the absence, falseness, circularity, or self-defeating nature of any kind of closure to the investigation” (Merivale and Sweeney, p.8).
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Joris, K. (2011). “The Quest for Her Story: Vanessa & Virginia (Susan Sellers) as Metaphysical Detective Story”. Bloomsbury Adaptations, Bath Spa University (UK). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/159738