LoveReading Says
I’ve rarely read a book that gave me so much writer’s envy as Mrs March. From the first page, I kept thinking – I wish I’d written this. There’s not too much I can say about the plot without spoiling some of the novel’s most surprising pleasures, but I’ll try.
Mrs March, preparing for a party to celebrate her husband’s latest novel, discovers that the main character in the novel, an aging prostitute who nobody wants to sleep with, is based on her. This sets off a chain of speculation and increasingly macabre events that leave the reader wound tight as a spring – and Mrs March begins to suspect that her husband, George, may in fact be a murderer. Or is Mrs March going mad? We are distanced from our highly unreliable narrator until the very last page by never knowing her first name. Yet Virginia Feito simultaneously hews us so closely into her protagonists’ perspective that it becomes an act of horror in itself. The prose is spare, hallucinatory, peppered with razor sharp insight. It’s one of the best evocations I have ever read of anxiety, the inner gallop of panic induced by the prospect of making a decision. Mrs March’s gradual transformation over the course of the book is agonising to witness. And it is deeply, deliciously gothic.
Selected by Catriona Ward, Our Winter 2022 Guest Editor. Click here to read the full Guest Editor Piece.
LoveReading
Find This Book In
Mrs. March Synopsis
George March’s latest novel is a smash. No one could be prouder than his dutiful wife, Mrs. March, who revels in his accolades. A careful creature of routine and decorum, she lives a precariously controlled existence on the Upper East Side until one morning, when the shopkeeper of her favorite patisserie suggests that her husband’s latest protagonist—a detestable character named Johanna—is based on Mrs. March herself. Clutching her ostrich leather pocketbook and mint-colored gloves, she flees the shop. What could have merited this humiliation? That one casual remark robs Mrs. March of the belief that she knew everything about her husband—and herself—thus sending her on an increasingly paranoid journey that begins within the pages of a book. While snooping in George’s office, Mrs. March finds a newspaper clipping about a missing woman. Did George have anything to do with her disappearance? He’s been going on a lot of “hunting trips” up north with his editor lately, leaving Mrs. March all alone at night with her tormented thoughts, and the cockroaches that have suddenly started to appear, and strange breathing noises . . . As she begins to decode her husband’s secrets, her deafening anxiety and fierce determination threaten everyone in her wake—including her stoic housekeeper, Martha, and her unobtrusive son, Jonathan, whom she loves so profoundly, when she remembers to love him at all. Combining a Hitchcockian sensibility with wickedly dark humor, Virginia Feito, a brilliantly talented and, at times, mischievous newcomer, offers a razor-sharp exploration of the fragility of identity. A mesmerizing novel of psychological suspense and casebook insecurity turned full-blown neurosis, Mrs. March will have you second-guessing your own seemingly familiar reflection in the mirror.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781324091967 |
| Publication date: |
5th July 2022 |
| Author: |
Virginia Feito |
| Publisher: |
WW Norton & Co |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
304 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Family Drama
|
| Other Genres: |
|
| Recommendations: |
|
Virginia Feito Press Reviews
'I read Mrs March in one sitting and was so captured by it ... As a character, [Mrs March] is fascinating, complex, and deeply human' Elisabeth Moss
'Feito nods deftly to her forebears - there are shades of Hitchcock and Highsmith here ... while the opening chapter puts one in mind of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway ... Nastily good fun' Claire Allfree, Metro
'Virginia Feito's noirish debut novel left me rapt, gleefully ambivalent about her eponymous protagonist: did I like her? Did I find her funny? Did I want to hug her? Was I bit a scared of her? Did I relate to her? To all of the above: yes ... an elegant, claustrophobic psychological thriller that feels incredibly original' Evening Standard
'What a rancid little book, I absolutely loved it' Alice Slater
'The atmosphere of queasy foreboding is compelling, as is the portrayal of a flawed, troubled and complex individual trying to keep it together while coming apart at the seams' Economist
'A brilliantly tense psychological study from a writer who keeps pace with the grandees she invokes - Du Maurier, for one ... Feito has done that most horrible, wonderful and truly novelistic of things: she has seen right through Mrs March and into the shameful, petty, maggoty secrets that everybody carries' Guardian
'A delicious, disorienting study of suspicion, societal pressure and shifting identities, brilliantly rendered. I swallowed this tale down as greedily as if it were Mrs. March's beloved olive bread' Rachel Edwards, author of Darling
'Gloriously grotesque: tormented by the desire for glossy magazine perfection; cruelly judgemental; frantic to believe the world revolves around her. And yet Feito makes her guilt-inducingly relatable...The gothic awfulness of her predicament reminds you of Ottessa Moshfegh's grand guignol creations and lurid descriptive talents; Shirley Jackson's claustrophobic horror' The Times
