Book Review: ‘Mrs March’ by Virginia Feito

This book has enjoyed a lot of hype on Twitter so I was very grateful to NetGalley, Fourth Estate Books and William Collins for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is the story of Mrs March – always referred to as Mrs March and never informally – who is a wealthy woman living in New York’s Upper East Side with her successful novelist husband, George, and their son. The time period isn’t revealed, but we are in a pre-internet world where women don’t work and host cocktail parties and wear formal gloves in the street. Mrs March seems to love her comfortable existence and keeping up of appearances…right up until a woman in a shop makes a comment about George’s latest novel.

The comment is that the heroine of the novel, Johanna (a prostitute), is clearly based on Mrs March and it is this – not cruelly intended – that leads to Mrs March’s unravelling. She becomes obsessed that George isn’t the man she thought and begins to be preoccupied by some very dark ideas about him. Her mental state deteriorates and the reader is party to Mrs March’s increasingly unstable thought processes.

This is all very cleverly presented and the reader is left unsure as to what is real and what is the product of Mrs March’s disturbed imagination. Some of what she experiences is genuinely horrific – including an infestation of cockroaches and gory versions of herself – but a lot is deeply unnerving. We hear about paintings altering and wonder – along with Mrs March – whether this is George’s plan to undermine her sanity. We see other characters’ reactions to Mrs March and feel the disconnection between these and the way she seems to think she is presenting herself. It is really cleverly written and very unsettling – and the dark humour adds to this sense throughout.

As a result of the unreliable narration and the truly bizarre occurences, this is a tricky book to read. Although I was caught up in the story and genuinely keen to see where it was headed, I did find that it felt very fragmented and uneven at times. The second half of the novel really gathers pace though, so I was very happy to see it through to the finale.

Overall, I’d recommend this to readers of literary fiction who are prepared to go with the flow – the novel takes some interesting twists and the readers needs to be prepared to be carried along into Mrs March’s deepest obsessions and darkest thoughts. This isn’t for readers who deal in absolutes as there is a lot of ambiguity in the book. This is an unusual but rewarding book – and an interesting portrait of a woman living in a world of facades, caught between social expectation and mental illness.

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