In the footsteps of Virginia Woolf

• • • • Maggie Gee explains how she wrote the novel that brought Virginia Woolf back to life in the 21st century
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      • Maggie Gee - The Guardian, Friday 19 September 2014 
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    ·         Daring … Virginia Woolf. Photograph: George C Beresford/Getty Images

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    Would I have embarked on a novel that brings Virginia Woolf back to life in the 21st century if I had realised how inhibiting it is to live with the ghost of our greatest female writer? Worse, I intended to make love to her – anyone who writes an explicit love scene for one of their creations imagines making love to them. Yes, I knew her work; I read her long ago for my doctoral thesis, and then again when I wrote the text for a British Council Woolf exhibition. But this was fiction, and Woolf has thousands of admirers all over the world. In summer they congregate at Charleston festival in the grounds of her sister Vanessa Bell's Sussex home.

    
    

    So, earlier this year, I was sweating with fear at Charleston as I faced around 300 of her fans, including Woolf's great-niece Virginia Nicholson. The evening before, Eileen Atkins had performed A Room of One's Own. Now hundreds of blank faces turned towards me and my heart pounded, for my reading from the novel entailed my own amateur impression of Virginia's vowels.

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