This is a work of memoir, based on the author’s memory. The events depicted are accurate to the best of her knowledge, though some may remember them differently. Some names and identifying details have been changed or composite characters created, in order to protect the privacy of the individuals described. In certain cases, conversations and events from disparate occasions have been compressed for length and clarity.

Copyright © 2025 by Heather Christle. All rights reserved.

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Design by Steve Godwin.

ISBN 9781643755922 (hardcover) ISBN 9781643755953 (ebook)

LCCN 2024055310 (hardcover) LCCN 2024055311 (ebook)

E3-20250305-JV-NF-ORI

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

PART ONE

Gate

Half

A Sketch of the Past

Paradise

Birthday Hill

Wall

Model

Bibliomancy

PART TWO

Bridge

On Fire

Night and Day

Tides

Portraits

Correction

PART THREE

Hither

Thither

Tourist

The Distant Thames

Lock and Key

The Underworld

Very Small Flags

“October the 10th, 1980, 2:25 AM.”

The Wild Goose

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Discover More

Sources

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Table of Contents

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PROLOGUE

THE FIRST TIME PERSEPHONE was kidnapped, it was by Hades, god of the Underworld, who found her picking flowers in a meadow and carried her into the earth in his golden chariot. Her mother, Demeter—goddess of the harvest—was furious. Eventually she negotiated for her daughter’s return, but only for half of each year. Ever since, for the months they are kept apart, Demeter has withheld her warmth and left the land to its fate.

The second time Persephone was kidnapped it was by Thomas Bruce, the British Lord Elgin, who pried her from her home in the Parthenon and dragged her marble form from Athens to the British Museum. This time, at least, her mother came too. They and their marble neighbors sit now in a massive hall near small signs that tell parts of their story, among which one can find no mention of Greece’s ongoing demand for their return. That homecoming, the signs imply, is unnecessary: “[T]hese remarkable portrayals of human form have transcended their ancient past to become a representation of humanity itself.”

In my childhood, I lived in New Hampshire with my American father and my English mother, who would return with my sister and me to her home country every other year or so, visiting family, historic sites, stately homes and galleries, so that we might absorb a full sense of ourselves as belonging to the place, but somehow she never took us to the British Museum. Perhaps she thought it not British enough, its holdings mostly scraped from an imperial elsewhere and forced into transcendence. In any case, when I walked into the museum one rainy day in March of 2023, it was for the first time.

To all appearances I came alone. This is what the security guards and cameras would say, but these days, as soon as I step foot in England, Virginia Woolf’s voice echoes inside me, whispering about what once happened here, or conjuring characters I watch pass about the room. I know she has been dead since she drowned herself in 1941, but over my years of reading her thousands of pages of novels, essays, letters, and diaries, my years of travel—real and imagined—back to the land of my mother’s birth, I have grown accustomed to playing the rhythms of her language as mental soundtrack to the scenes of my own life.

The British Museum’s Room 18, where the Parthenon Marbles are held, wasn’t built until 1939, late in Woolf’s life, and so her encounters with what she (and everyone around her) then called the Elgin Marbles occurred in a different space, adorned with different signs. The marbles themselves have also shifted. Entire heads have disappeared. Books too. In Woolf’s lifetime the holdings of the British Library were still housed inside the Museum, but in 1997 they were moved a bit farther north to their own building at St. Pancras. I love my visits to that newer building, touching words written in Woolf’s own hand, but I can’t help longing for an hour or two of working beneath the great dome of the old reading room, which still stands, but has been repurposed for archival storage, closed off for more than a decade.

It’s to that old, circular space that Woolf brings her title character in her 1922 novel Jacob’s Room. She sets the young Jacob to copying passages of poetry, while nearby an elderly Miss Marchmont works through her too-large pile of books—gathered in a wooly-headed attempt to construct a philosophy of color, music, and sound—a pile so precariously stacked that it tumbles over into Jacob’s compartment. Woolf seems to pity Miss Marchmont a bit, and I sometimes fear I resemble the woman, with my own embarrassingly overabundant stack of books. How much more comfortable to imagine, then, that I am like the narrator¹ of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, who describes “an avalanche of books sliding down on to the desk” where she too sits in the same reading room, trying to figure things out. (For if “truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum,” she asks, wide-eyed and deadpan, then where is truth?)

In Jacob’s Room, when the reading room closes for the day, Miss Marchmont picks up her shabby umbrella and goes for a quick visit to the Parthenon Marbles on her way out. She waves hello, greeting the statues aloud, and the woman’s eccentric address to the inanimate draws young Jacob’s attention. He turns around, struck by the oddness of her behavior, and though I brace myself for a descent into shame, Miss Marchmont doesn’t seem to mind his gaze. She smiles at him, “amiably,” and when I think of this moment, it feels as if somewhere back behind the page Woolf smiles too, as if she notices her readers’ distress and subsequent relief, as if she could actually see us, as if it were no great matter to reach through the words and touch another’s time.

That day in March, as I stood in Room 18, gazing around the crowd of human figures (some marble, most flesh) the thought of Miss Marchmont’s eccentricity—and Woolf’s smile—gave me a little burst of courage. I walked around to see the marble gods from the back, a generally unpopulated area. Not forbidden, by any means, but just odd enough that I felt the eyes of a guard upon me. I tried to pretend he was not there. It was Demeter and Persephone I wanted to see. Mother and daughter are headless, footless, somewhat ravaged, but Demeter still rests her arm on Persephone’s shoulder, loving and relaxed. I could detect no anxious protection, no bodily tension indicating defense. It must be spring, I decided, the season when Persephone returns from the Underworld and her mother lets the rage and grief of winter go.

I WAS NEVER KIDNAPPED, but I have been to the Underworld. In the summer of 1995, when I was fourteen, my grandfather died, and my mother and I flew to England for the funeral. My father (a merchant mariner) was at sea, and my sister was signed up for a week of camp, so I was my mother’s sole companion. When we arrived, my mother settled into her parents’ flat, while I was sent to stay with my cousin and his girlfriend. They were both in their early twenties and I treated myself to imagining I was one of their glamorous friends. It was exciting. I’d never been in London without my mother before. My cousin and his girlfriend took me out one night in Camden Town, let me drink myself into oblivion. I remember very little, but I know that we walked to the World’s End—a semi-legendary pub—and I borrowed someone’s ID to enter the Underworld, the basement club below.

It was there, in the Underworld, that I danced with a man whose face time has worn away, but whose hands I remember later in an alleyway reaching beneath my dress to pull down my underwear. I remember the feeling of my back against the wall. I don’t remember what happened next, but I can easily recall the immense shame I felt back at my cousin’s flat when I looked down at the bright spots of blood. I was supposed to be grown-up. I was afraid that my underwear, white cotton and high-waisted, had given me away as a child. I was afraid I was in trouble. I was still drunk.

The next day, my cousin and his girlfriend went to a family dinner, everyone gathered around the table, around the fact of my grandfather’s death. I spent the evening alone in their basement flat, vomiting from the combined effects of alcohol and the morning-after pill. I watched Pulp Fiction.

I waited for my mother. Her rage. Not with the man, but maybe my cousin, or with me. How terribly I had misbehaved. I waited for winter. I did not know the myth, but instinctively I wanted her to tear England apart, like Demeter in Ovid’s telling, to “forbid the fields to bear a crop / of any kind” so that “[this] island that had boasted its plenty / Throughout the world [would] lay barren.” Or just for her to want to find me. She did not come. Summer rolled onward.

There was an emptiness in the years that followed, all through high school. My sister went away to boarding school, and with my father so often at sea, for months at a time our house was home to only my mother and myself. I struggled with feelings I did not know how to name, let alone control. The more I acted out, the further away my mother drew. She made certain I received the education she desired for me, at great cost—as I was often reminded—but beyond that I could expect little in the way of emotional support. I had, I came to understand, gone bad. She found me upsetting.

Over time, and in particular over the years of writing this book, I have learned to gather subjects through which I can perceive my mother indirectly, the way people will watch an eclipse through a pinhole viewer so the sun cannot burn their eyes. The life of Virginia Woolf has proved to be an especially reliable space within which I can make my explorations: she is geographically proximate (both Woolf and my mother spent years living near Kew Gardens), and their biographies overlap at certain points of shared suffering, but between the two women there are enough differences in class, artistic practice, and historical moment that if, as I worked, their overlaid paths began to feel too dangerously bright I could step off onto a shadier route. The other day, among my notebooks full of research and other acts of composition, I found a sentence I had written to myself along the way, something between a joke and prayer: Virginia Woolf can’t hurt me (haha).

DOWN THE STREET FROM the British Museum, a lingering winter threatened the early March daffodils. It was cold and wet enough that I ought to have caught a taxi back to my hotel, but I had another statue to visit, the bust of Virginia Woolf that stands a few blocks away, at one corner of Tavistock Square. It was not our first meeting. Every time I see this casting of her I wish she had not been left frozen in this haunted expression. It’s good, of course, the sculptor Stephen Tomlin’s talent undeniable, but I don’t want so many people to meet her this way. I don’t want her public presence to be so locked into sorrow. It too easily narrows her life down to her death, as if she were forever about to walk into the River Ouse and drown. There are other ways she walked, other places. I have tried to learn those paths, and my mother’s too. Restless with what I have been told—even by my own memories—I have wanted to go and see for myself.

This book contains several journeys to the UK: one with my mother and sister in September of 2018, and then three on my own: October 2019, September–October 2021, and March 2023 (the visit I have been describing here). Each return has brought with it new understanding, new ways to view old stories.

When Woolf was twenty-three she traveled to Athens, visiting the Parthenon, the temple from which Elgin snatched the gods. Some figures still remained; in her diary Woolf wrote of “fat Maidens” who hold up the portico, smiling “with tranquil ease, for their burden is just meet for their strength.” She let her imagination fill the scene in further, so that “the warm blue sky flows into all the crevices of the marble; yet they detach themselves, & spring in to the air, with crisp edges, unblunted, & still virile & young.”

If you look closely or for long enough at anything, time can’t help but flood in, carrying the detritus of the past and future with it. One day in the British Library at St. Pancras, I unlatched the brass fastenings of The Mausoleum Book, an autobiography handwritten by Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, who was so in the habit of profuse composition that even as he lay dying he insisted his words be taken down to the page. The final entry is written in Woolf’s dutiful hand, her father’s voice moving her pen to record an address to her and her siblings: “I have only to say to you, my children, that you have all been as good & tender to me as anyone could be during their last months & indeed years.” It was after he ceased dictating that Woolf’s pen was able to go fully and freely in search of new lines. I have not yet suffered my mother’s death. It may be that when I do I will feel my pen’s weight shift. Perhaps, alongside my grief, there will be a release from the fear of hurting her.

She has always been a sensitive person. Once, as a child, she snuck into her parents’ bedroom to read letters they wrote to one another during the early years of their marriage, through the trials of the Blitz and my grandfather’s time in the army. Years before my mother’s birth, my grandfather wrote to his young wife to say how completely content he was with their lives, their two children—my aunt and uncle—and that he could not imagine wanting anything more. Between the lines, my mother interposed a meaning that upset her: she was unwanted, a burden or a mistake. She could not ask her parents to allay her fears without revealing her trespass, and so she cried through this alone.

Through the course of writing this book, I have gradually asked my mother for permission to read letters and diaries she wrote during my childhood and adolescence, hoping to find a more detailed understanding of events whose lines had disintegrated in my memory over time. Over time she agreed. She is sensitive; she is also brave. Because she placed her pages in my hands, and because she has allowed me to tip their sentences into the work you now hold, I have not had to hide what I learned, nor the pain we have both felt.

My mother says she likes having the words to go back and visit, a feeling common to many diarists. I have only ever made sporadic attempts at keeping a diary myself, but I often think of visiting the past, of seeing then through now, and now through then. In 1932, decades after her first trip to the Parthenon, Virginia Woolf returned to Athens with her husband and friends. This time she wrote, “Yes, but what can I say of the Parthenon—that my own ghost met me, the girl of 23; with all her life to come: that; & then, this is more compact & splendid & robust than I remembered… Now I’m 50… now I’m greyhaired & well through life I suppose I like the vital, the flourish in the face of death.” She found, among the statues, a shifted understanding of her own figure. It’s not possible to describe what one perceives when returning to a place, or to the past, without also learning what has changed in oneself.

ON MY LAST DAY of my March trip to London I went to the Underworld alone, no Woolf. I walked beneath my red umbrella northward for two miles, from Trafalgar through Leicester Square, up Hampstead Road past a sign that said we’re time travelers, an advertisement whose intended purpose I did not try to determine. I find joy in such encounters, taking the sign’s presence as an invitation to imagine, the world in its generosity endlessly offering language that might be read a different way. Even if a sign’s words remain the same, their meaning can shift, the letters cracking enough to let us inside and rearrange what was thought to be settled.

It had been twenty-eight years since I last came to the Underworld. I calculated this as I approached the site, crossing back and forth over the street to avoid long stretches of construction work. The earth around me was broken open, letting myth flood in. I thought of the six red pomegranate seeds Persephone ate, evidence used against her after she was rescued to sentence her to perpetual return. In my mind I had returned to the Underworld so many times I’d lost count, but those visits always occurred in the strange atmosphere of incomplete memory, a space from which seasons and weather drift away.

In the present, the rain was coming down harder, my freezing hands holding tight to my red umbrella, which the wind pulled nearly inside out. I circled the Underworld, looking for the alleyway, feeling self-conscious as I went around the back. What are you doing here? I feared some authoritative voice demanding. What would I say? How do you explain this kind of returning? I’m not as old as Woolf at the Parthenon—my hair’s only flecked with gray—but enough years have passed that I did wonder if I might meet my own ghost, the girl of fourteen with all her life to come. Could I offer that as my reason? Yes sir, I’m looking for my ghost. I suspected this explanation would be met with a better reaction than the other I considered: I am a mother now myself and I have a mother’s rage. Sir, I am here to break your windows and let this furious winter in. I looked around for a rock.

Then I saw the alleyway, across the side street, sudden and unmistakable. I walked over and touched the brick wall. I pressed my hand against it. I looked around again. I could not see her—no ghost, no girl—and my eyes fell instead upon a sign painted onto a wall just around the corner. Years had worn its message away, though not completely. Amid what had faded to white one word remained, continued speaking. I read it to myself silently. Then, with sudden decision, I read it aloud, not caring if passersby gazed at me or thought me strange.

Please I said. That was the word. Nothing happened. I was cold. I put down the red umbrella, pressing it shut on the ground. I stood back up. If anyone approached me, my hands would give nothing away. It was still winter. Rain fell on my head. I read the white sign. Nobody came. I tried again.

Footnote

1 That narrator is a slippery figure, one who declares that “‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.” “Lies,” she goes on, “will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping.” She has little interest in acquiring stable identification: “[C]all me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael, or by any name you please,” she says. “It is not a matter of any importance.”