ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, ‘Virginia’s Daughters’, examines the flight of Maggie Gee’s and Clare Morgan’s imaginations in Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014) and A Book for All and None (2011) as they move further away from the ‘bio’ and set fewer limits to the ‘fiction’, thus stretching the limits of plausibility. Gee’s Virginia resurrected in the twenty-first century is a ‘what if’ scenario taken to its extreme; similarly, the revelation about a specific detail in the life of Morgan’s Virginia remains physically, biographically, biologically and historically impossible and defies all credibility. Beyond offering fanciful, entertaining stories, these biographical novels raise important critical questions about the ‘death of the author’ in general and of Woolf in particular, about her literary daughters’ duty to preserve her legacy in the twenty-first century despite the ‘anxiety of influence’ and the fear of writing and living in the shadow of the formidable Woolf.
