Rest Harrow

Sarah Robertson is an editor in the College Division of Nelson Canada.

Anna English, the Canadian heroine of Keefer’s second novel, rents a
cottage in Sussex known as Rest Harrow, where she plans to write a
biography of Virginia Woolf. Accident-prone, emotionally stunted, and
pursued by a troubled past, Anna lurches from one disaster to the next
as she mixes uneasily with the locals. It is the Thatcher era, and
despair laced with cynicism is a sine qua non. A neighbor given to
apocalyptic broodings plasters to her walls newspaper clippings that
depict human atrocities and environmental outrages. Anna herself
attempts to recover meaning from the daily assault of news items, only
to discover that “facts . . . were a mirror that threw back no
reflection whatsoever, only shattered glass.” Paralleling Woolf’s
descent into the Ouse River is a tragedy that sends Anna into a downward
spiral, from which she emerges bereft of illusions and thus better
equipped to nurture an unexpected opportunity for personal redemption.

More thematically resonant than Constellations, this compelling and
disquieting novel shares with its predecessor a lush and evocative prose
style, and captures, at its conclusion, one of those “moments of
being” that Woolf herself experienced on rare and treasured
occasions—not through an act of will, but as a kind of grace.