Abstract

Creating Virginia is a novel which explores questions of family relationships and memory, and the connections which bind the present to the past. The title character, Virginia Dare Paige, is soon to turn fifty. Her children are grown and life with her husband has become a stale routine. Feeling alone, she begins to question her life as a wife and a mother. She travels from her home in Quebec to Virginia, the place where she grew up. She and her sister Barbra spend a week touring the state with their parents, a trip which Martha and Victor Dare have planned as a sort of summary of their lives--not only the faces of it but the emotional details, the particulars which make them who they are. Although Ginny may go unwillingly, the voyage takes her through history into her past: metaphorically she travels deeper into herself