This novel explores the life stories of a bookshop employee and avid reader, Margaret Lea and a notoriously mysterious and reclusive author, Vida Winter. With the end of her life quickly approaching, Vida Winter has decided that the time has come to share the truth about her past. After making up one outlandish history after another, Ms. Winter seeks out the relatively unknown Margaret Lea to tell her story. What unfolds is an enchanting and eerie tale about confronting your past and the ways in which it has shaped you.
There is a passage in the novel that is particularly fascinating in it's description of writing. This excerpt also provides a rare glimpse into the mind of an author. Dickens' Dream by Robert Buss is shown below and is "the picture" that Vida Winter is referring to in the following passage
"Why recall the picture now, you must be wondering. The reason I remember it so well is that it seems to be an image of the way I have lived my own life. I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.
"My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, 'Me next! Go on! My turn!' I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again."
I love this part of the novel because it's description of the author's mind is so vivid and it is given with such eloquence, one is almost transported into the dreamlike mind of Ms. Winter. I will leave you with just one more short excerpt because it has lingered with me and I wonder if it will be the same for others.
"All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes-characters even-caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you."
