Wise Virgin by A. N. Wilson

First published: 1982

Type of work: Romantic comedy

Time of work: The early 1980’s

Locale: London, Cambridge, and Wiltshire

Principal Characters:

• Giles Fox, the protagonist, a blind librarian and scholar
• Tibba Fox, his teenage daughter
• Louise Agar, his research assistant
• Meg Gore, his sister
• Monty Gore, Meg’s husband, a master at Pangham, a public school
• Piers Peverill, Tibba’s boyfriend, a Pangham student
• Mary Fox, Giles’s late first wife
• Carol Fox, his late second wife
• Mrs. Agar, Louise’s mother, a piano teacher
• Captain de Courcy, a con man whom Tibba imagines she loves

The Novel

Giles Fox is a librarian (keeper of manuscripts in a London museum) and medievalist who has spent the previous eighteen years editing A Tretis of Loue Heuenliche, an early thirteenth century tract on virginity. Giles’s only ambition is to have the work published by the Early English Text Society so that his scholarship can be admired by the handful of people capable of understanding its significance.

While working on the Tretis, Giles has married Mary, has fathered Tibba, has seen his marriage become a farce as his wife indulges in affair after affair, and has become reconciled with her only for her to die in childbirth. This calamity is followed by others. Giles loses the sight of one eye and then the other. He marries Carol, one of his nurses, and less than a year later, she is struck and killed by a taxi. Through it all, he and Tibba grow closer, he becoming more and more dependent upon her, she being drawn into his life of asceticism and obsession with the past.

Giles has hired as his assistant twenty-six-year-old Louise Agar, whose Cambridge dissertation has failed. Wise Virgin opens as Louise suddenly, after a year of working with Giles, declares her love for him. While a student, she read all of his articles and is the closest he will ever come to having a fan.

A secondary plot involves Giles’s sister, Meg, and her husband, Monty Gore, a master at Pangham, a public school in Wiltshire. Monty devotes most of his energies to attempting to foil the exploits of Piers Peverill, a particularly arrogant and obnoxious student whose sole purpose in life seems to be to see how many of Pangham’s time-honored rules he can break. Monty’s efforts to have Peverill expelled are frustrated by the influence of the boy’s wealthy father with the headmaster.

The two plots converge when attractive seventeen-year-old Tibba visits the Gores and meets the cocky Peverill, who gives her her first kiss while he is driving—another rule violation—her back to London. Their car breaks down on the way, and when Tibba does not return home at the scheduled time, Giles is convinced, because of prior tragedies, that she has been killed. When he refers to his daughter as the “only person whose companionship means anything to me at all,” Louise realizes that he can never return her feelings and withdraws her proposal of marriage.

When Giles finds out about Peverill, he becomes intensely jealous. He maneuvers behind Monty’s back to keep the boy from being kicked out of Pangham, since that would mean his being in London and nearer Tibba. Giles’s endeavors, however, do not prevent Tibba from losing her virginity to Peverill.

With his beloved daughter spending more time away from him and his manuscript finally sent off, Giles finds his life empty and wishes that he and Louise were going to marry. Tibba has quickly learned to be manipulative and arranges for Louise and her mother to spend Christmas day with Giles so that she can be with Peverill. Neither Giles nor the Agars are enthusiastic about the visit until Mrs. Agar, a piano teacher, begins to play. The music causes Giles to experience an epiphany, and he asks Louise to marry him. The happy ending is ironically undercut by something none of the protagonists knows: Because Louise has made what she considers last-minute improvements in Giles’s manuscript, the Early English Text Society finds it unpublishable without extensive revisions.

The Characters

Meg and Monty consider Giles “pernickety, selfish, imposing.” He is a totally self-centered person who thinks nothing of having Tibba devote her life to him, who sees his wives’ deaths only in terms of how they affect him, who barely notices Louise until she professes her love. His only passion is his Tretis.

Giles’s main motive in devoting his life to this work is not love of scholarship but his desire to show up the Cambridge dons who, twenty years before, denied him a fellowship and the academic life in which he would have reveled—even if blind. He believes that the chaos of his life would not have occurred had not the dons been so callous. Giles gradually decides, however, that he has wasted his life being bitter, realizing that it is “easier to be cynical, cold, skeptical, pessimistic.” He discovers that marriage, fatherhood, and blindness have done little to alter him from the smug undergraduate he once was. Revisiting Cambridge with Louise reminds him of his failure there and all the failures since, and causes him to realize that he has been longing for forgiveness for his hatred of the world. At first, he feels superior to Louise’s dull, devoutly religious Cambridge friends, but he comes to envy their “niceness,” since any such quality in himself has been worn away by cynicism.

Tibba resembles any intelligent, good-natured teenager except that she stammers and knows little of the modern world. She adores Virginia Woolf and tries to see everything from a satiric Bloomsbury point of view. Reading Sir Walter Scott and Anthony Trollope to her father each night, she accepts his distrust of modernity, never understanding when her schoolmates speak of Pink Floyd or the Social Democrats. Named for a sixth century East Saxon princess of devout life, Tibba lives an insular existence until her passion for pimply Peverill thrusts her into the real world.

Tibba considers the only blemish on her life to be the loss of her mother. She sees the years before Mary’s death as a golden age when her mother could solve any problem almost instantaneously. Giles’s second marriage she regards as a betrayal of both her and Mary, and she prays for Carol’s death, only to be horrified when it occurs the next day. A romantic who fantasizes about loving a mysterious Captain de Courcy, Tibba is the moral opposite of her father.

It is significant that Tibba begins to break with Giles’s view of life during the drive from Pangham to London. As Peverill’s MG reaches one hundred miles an hour, she enters the contemporary world: “It felt as though they were flying through time on a winged horse.” When Peverill kisses her, Tibba feels “violated, disgusted, and yet profoundly thrilled. The door slammed shut on her Past.” In her race to embrace life, she tells her friends that she has lost her virginity before she has.

Tall, “lumpish,” plain Louise seems destined to live a tedious, uneventful life but cannot find her niche. Not only does the academic world reject her; so do the nuns of the Society of the Sacred Passion. She chooses Giles to give her existence some meaning, never having even held a man before. Her inexperience, deeper than Tibba’s, and Giles’s selfishness combine to make their relationship more farcical than pathetic. Louise starts to mature only when she begins to perceive the blind scholar’s true nature. Her mother’s direct approach to Giles shows her that the way to love him is to allow him to consider her an equal, not as a nun worshiping a damaged god.

Critical Context

Wilson’s novels offer satiric views of the absurdities of academic, religious, and political life in contemporary Great Britain. The irony, verbal wit, and farcical comedy in these works have earned for him comparisons with Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Joyce Cary, Barbara Pym, Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Paul Theroux, Tom Sharpe, and P. G. Wodehouse.

The emphasis of the satire in Wise Virgin, Wilson’s sixth novel, is on the equally isolated worlds of the academic and the religious. Giles Fox’s spartan, self-absorbed scholarly life is made only slightly more insulated by his blindness. Louise’s Anglican friends at Cambridge speak of religious issues as if unaware, according to Giles, of the Enlightenment, Darwin, Hitler, Stalin, the Holocaust, and the bomb.

Wise Virgin’s similarities to Wilson’s other novels include weaving pertinent literary allusions into the plot and themes. Tibba is reading William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605-1606) as she moves from being a loyal Cordelia to a woman with a mind of her own, and Giles is a combination of Lear, Fool, and blind Gloucester. (The blindness motif is also noteworthy, since Wilson was working on a biography of John Milton, published in 1983, while writing Wise Virgin.) Wilson intersperses commentary from the Tretis of Loue Heuenliche throughout the novel, just as he quotes from the journals of a Victorian architect in Who Was Oswald Fish? (1981). Wise Virgin ends with a pathetic portrait of Captain de Courcy, revealing him to be the opposite of the dashing figure Tibba thinks she has been seeing once a week to learn how to overcome her stammer. This pattern of progressing from farce to more serious consideration of issues to sad, ironic coda was established in Wilson’s first novel, The Sweets of Pimlico (1977).

Wise Virgin stands out from Wilson’s other works in the comparative gentleness of its satire and in its compassionate, hopeful tone. While Wilson is frequently criticized for his bleak view of modern society, in Wise Virgin he makes fun of such an attitude through Giles’s initial pessimism. The novel is also significant in offering believable, sympathetic, very likable female characters in a period when many writers can present the opposite sex only as caricatures.

Bibliography

Duffy, Martha. Review in Time. CXXII (December 5, 1983), p. 99.

Forbes, Nancy. Review in The Nation. CCXXXVII (December 3, 1983), p. S77.

Gorra, Michael. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX (November 27, 1983), p. 12.

Prescott, Peter S. Review in Newsweek. CII (October 31, 1983), p. 84.

Rogers, Pat. Review in The Times Literary Supplement. November 5, 1982, p. 1121.