AUDIOBOOK
About
A queer psychological thriller from a beguiling, fresh new voice.
Victoria is unraveling. Her best friend is missing, and she's the only one who seems to care: there are clues all over Cambridge, but Deb is nowhere to be found--and the harder Victoria looks, the less she sees.
Victoria is raised in a crumbling house in England by her working-class aunt and uncle, until her academic brilliance gains her entrance to Cambridge. There, she meets her first true friend, Deb, a spacey aristocrat, and the girls create their own tiny bubble within Cambridge's strict class system. Until Deb disappears.
In her search for her friend, Victoria finds an unlikely ally--a police officer named Julie. They travel the countryside, visiting sites of suicides, murders, and accidents. But eventually, Julie's emotional demands overwhelm Victoria, and she retreats into a lonely life of academia, always teetering on the edge of emotional collapse.
Wandering through a miasma of sexism, isolation, physical and mental health issues, Victoria's story is haunted by the spectre of her mother, whose own assault and subsequent pregnancy represent a break in her contract with the world. "In Victoria Sees It, Carrie Jenkins pursues the idea of women's madness: its origins, its structures, and, most radically, its insights. When I began reading this beguiling story, I was put in mind of Charlotte Brontë, as the main character is a cross between the odd and serious Jane Eyre and the raving, attic-bound Mrs. Rochester. Jenkins's voice manages the rare feat of being remarkably intelligent and complex, while being fast paced and engaging. A brilliant thriller about the infinite corridors and wondrous nooks and crannies of women's minds." -Heather O'Neill CARRIE JENKINS is an award-winning philosopher and writer. She is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia and holds a PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She is the author of What Love Is and What It Could Be and Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato. Prologue
I can never go back to Cambridge. I don't mean like how Mrs. de Winter can never go back to Manderley. Cambridge has not literally burned to the ground. Not all of it anyway. It's still there. Still calling. What makes the place so magnetic? The magic of history? That's nothing magical, just a kind of mass hysteria. A folie à plusieurs.
But I suppose such things are necessary. Seeing the world as it really is makes you crazy. Accuracy is comorbid with depression, you know-major accuracy with major depression. We stay alive by means of the precise deployment of attention. Look at these seamless green banks, these ancient stone bridges arcing like half-moons, reflected to full circles in the flat jade water. These cloistered courtyards and these postcard-perfect weeping willows. Ophelia-esque, reaching down to greet the gorgeous swirling limbs of their watery counterparts. Punt on by.
Yet we must stick our poles into the mud at the bottom of it all. The present builds inexorably over the empty fields of the past. That's Dorothy L. Sayers. I suppose the way that I can never go back to Cambridge is the same way that her Harriet Vane could never go back to Oxford, until she could, and did, and look what happened to her. Women must be put in their place, and their place is not a university. Sayers gets that. So she sends poor Harriet-who, let's be honest, is herself in a wig and dark glasses-into a thinly fictionalized 1935 Oxford that cannot deal.
Ah, but 1935 was such a long time ago! Water under the bridge, right? The problem is, it turns out you can step twice in the same Isis, the same Cam. Honestly, you can throw yourself in a thousand times over and nobody is going to stop you. Stagnant. Sayers writes us a river full of garbage and the bodies of suicidal girls and all we want to do is go th
Victoria is unraveling. Her best friend is missing, and she's the only one who seems to care: there are clues all over Cambridge, but Deb is nowhere to be found--and the harder Victoria looks, the less she sees.
Victoria is raised in a crumbling house in England by her working-class aunt and uncle, until her academic brilliance gains her entrance to Cambridge. There, she meets her first true friend, Deb, a spacey aristocrat, and the girls create their own tiny bubble within Cambridge's strict class system. Until Deb disappears.
In her search for her friend, Victoria finds an unlikely ally--a police officer named Julie. They travel the countryside, visiting sites of suicides, murders, and accidents. But eventually, Julie's emotional demands overwhelm Victoria, and she retreats into a lonely life of academia, always teetering on the edge of emotional collapse.
Wandering through a miasma of sexism, isolation, physical and mental health issues, Victoria's story is haunted by the spectre of her mother, whose own assault and subsequent pregnancy represent a break in her contract with the world. "In Victoria Sees It, Carrie Jenkins pursues the idea of women's madness: its origins, its structures, and, most radically, its insights. When I began reading this beguiling story, I was put in mind of Charlotte Brontë, as the main character is a cross between the odd and serious Jane Eyre and the raving, attic-bound Mrs. Rochester. Jenkins's voice manages the rare feat of being remarkably intelligent and complex, while being fast paced and engaging. A brilliant thriller about the infinite corridors and wondrous nooks and crannies of women's minds." -Heather O'Neill CARRIE JENKINS is an award-winning philosopher and writer. She is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia and holds a PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She is the author of What Love Is and What It Could Be and Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato. Prologue
I can never go back to Cambridge. I don't mean like how Mrs. de Winter can never go back to Manderley. Cambridge has not literally burned to the ground. Not all of it anyway. It's still there. Still calling. What makes the place so magnetic? The magic of history? That's nothing magical, just a kind of mass hysteria. A folie à plusieurs.
But I suppose such things are necessary. Seeing the world as it really is makes you crazy. Accuracy is comorbid with depression, you know-major accuracy with major depression. We stay alive by means of the precise deployment of attention. Look at these seamless green banks, these ancient stone bridges arcing like half-moons, reflected to full circles in the flat jade water. These cloistered courtyards and these postcard-perfect weeping willows. Ophelia-esque, reaching down to greet the gorgeous swirling limbs of their watery counterparts. Punt on by.
Yet we must stick our poles into the mud at the bottom of it all. The present builds inexorably over the empty fields of the past. That's Dorothy L. Sayers. I suppose the way that I can never go back to Cambridge is the same way that her Harriet Vane could never go back to Oxford, until she could, and did, and look what happened to her. Women must be put in their place, and their place is not a university. Sayers gets that. So she sends poor Harriet-who, let's be honest, is herself in a wig and dark glasses-into a thinly fictionalized 1935 Oxford that cannot deal.
Ah, but 1935 was such a long time ago! Water under the bridge, right? The problem is, it turns out you can step twice in the same Isis, the same Cam. Honestly, you can throw yourself in a thousand times over and nobody is going to stop you. Stagnant. Sayers writes us a river full of garbage and the bodies of suicidal girls and all we want to do is go th