Praise for Victoria Sees It
“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, author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel and Lullabies for Little Criminals
“Carrie Jenkins’s novel is as intimate as it is intense. This rich thriller delves into the muck of academia—the sexism and classism and politicking that proliferates in the cracks of Cambridge and beyond. Her Victoria is a searcher, one with an astute awareness of behavioural quirks and an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.”
—Daniel Viola, Features Editor, The Walrus
“Victoria Sees It is delightful and disorienting, wretched and wry. Reading it is like rummaging through boxes in a crowded attic: you become subsumed, sifting through layers of memory while some barely-noticed haunted thing watches you from a dark corner.”
—Ziya Jones, Senior Editor, Xtra
“For fans of Donna Tartt, this book—like most ‘hysterical’ women—is too smart to be dismissed.”
—Sruti Islam, creator of the Weird Era newsletter and bookseller at Librairie St-Henri
Copyright © 2021 by Carrie Jenkins
First edition published 2021
Strange Light and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780771049279
Ebook ISBN 9780771049286
Book design by Andrew Roberts
Cover art: RF Pictures / Getty Images
Published by Strange Light,
an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
a_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
I had never seen with my eyes ever in my life before anything so unnatural and appalling and my gaze faltered about the thing uncomprehendingly as if at least one of the customary dimensions was missing, leaving no meaning in the remainder.
— Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
— Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
CORRIDORS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Two
WORMS
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part Three
DOUGHNUTS
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part Four
“O”
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Part Five
TEARS
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
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 there for a holiday. That’s the magic.
As for me, however far away I get I can’t seem to stop sticking my pole into the mud. The other week I agreed to a public online “chat” about my work. It was against my better judgment, but I am constantly being told we need role models for women in academia. It makes me feel guilty. Of course, as soon as the admins took a few minutes’ unannounced break, the trolls swarmed. First the surface scum, the clinging weeds. I should make them a sandwich, I should be gang-raped, if a tree falls in a forest can they see a picture of my tits, why don’t I kill myself. Then the deep undertow, the ones who might be typing from down the hallway and use good grammar. Women get all the breaks in academia, work like mine proves we are naturally inferior thinkers, positive discrimination is the only reason I got this job which I cannot do and don’t deserve, why don’t I give up.
Well, why don’t I? I want out, but inertia is a killer. At least I got out of Cambridge. I don’t quite
