Virginia Feito Wrote a New York City Comedy of Manners—From Madrid
She wears fur. She carries an ostrich leather pocketbook. She lives in a “rather agreeable” Upper East Side apartment where the walls are lined with Ralph Lauren fabric and the wine is served in nut-molded glasses. Her name is Mrs. March, and she first strolled into Spanish author Virginia Feito’s imagination in late 2017. Feito, then 29, was procrastinating at work when the prim, paranoid character appeared. Feito was immediately smitten.
Mrs. March is now Mrs. March, a stylish debut novel out August 10th. The book tells the story of a woman whose husband publishes a novel featuring a character with an unsettling resemblance to Mrs. March herself. Disturbed by the perceived similarity—the character is, in Mrs. March’s words, “a whore”—she searches her husband’s study, where she finds a newspaper clipping about a young woman’s murder. Suspicious that Mr. March might himself have something to do with the crime, our housewife heroine begins her own investigation—a process that leads to the unravelling of not just her world, but also her psyche.
As literary as it is pulpy, Mrs. March straddles the line between psychological thriller and social satire — think HBO’s The Undoing or The Talented Mr. Ripley. Like those blockbuster titles, Mrs. March portrays a rarefied world as hellish Grand Guignol. The pleasure of the book is in watching all that psychotic menace come out into the open, and in trying to figure how much of it is actually real. Mrs. March might think she sees a woman across the street drenched in blood—but what if she’s simply had too much wine? She might believe the figures in a painting have turned their backs on her—but what if she’s just crazy?
Given the book’s cinematic, high-concept swagger, it should come as no surprise that it’s headed to the screen. Two-time Emmy Award winner Elisabeth Moss jumped at the chance to play Mrs. March after reading the manuscript in a single sitting. “I can’t wait to sink my teeth into her,” the actress said in a statement, as if channeling Mrs. March’s wry ferocity. The project is now in development with Blumhouse Productions, with Moss attached as a producer and star.
Before the movie deal, before the book auction, Feito was an unhappily successful copywriter at an advertising agency in Madrid. Her boss—also her boyfriend, now her fiancé— knew she was unsatisfied. So when he and other company leaders offered her a creative director position, they also gave her the option of leaving. As Feito put it to me on a recent Zoom call from Madrid, “They could promote me or they could fire me” — thus kicking in the unemployment benefits that would allow her to write. Feito chose the pink slip.
It was at this moment that she got serious about writing Mrs. March. Fearful she’d squander whole mornings watching Forensic Files, she gave herself a year to write the novel. In February 2019, precisely a year after leaving her job, she finished a draft of the book.
Given New York City’s prominence in the novel, it will likely come as a surprise to many readers that Feito isn’t herself a product of the world she’s chosen to skewer. Born in Madrid, she moved to Paris as a young girl. She later returned to Spain before heading to London for college.
Her New York education, then, came largely through family visits and films. (Among the movies she cites as particularly influential are Eyes Wide Shut, Rosemary’s Baby, and American Psycho.) She even wrote Mrs. March in English, the language of most of the culture she consumes.
Still, Feito is undeniably a creature of the continent—in particular Madrid, where she lives today. “I’ve loved every city I’ve ever lived in,” she wrote in an email, “but it always felt like I was having a brief adventure before going home.” Feito accordingly speaks with a light, barely perceptible accent, and projects an easygoing glamour. Laughing, she tells me she tried on “a lot of different outfits” before our conversation, eager as she was to find “something a writer would wear.” (She’s wearing an ivory V-neck sweater atop a starch-white Massimo Dutti shirt buttoned smartly to the neck. “I love the store,” says Feito. “It’s kind of like an elevated Zara.”)
The highlight of Feito’s ensemble, however, is a magnificent heart-shaped burst of an engagement ring that Feito’s Spanish fiancé gave her in the middle of lockdown, several weeks after she proposed to him with a gold Franck Muller watch.
Dissections of outfits and accessories are, in fact, entirely of a piece with the book. Indeed, for all its gleeful nastiness, Mrs. March is very much a comedy of manners—one where every Vicuna scarf and monogrammed napkin signifies something greater than itself. In Feito’s hands, clothes, jewels, and accessories are a way to reveal a character’s inner life; a method of specifying their place in the world; a means of prodding and provoking and even mocking them. A pair of mint green kidskin gloves, in other words, is never just a pair of mint green kidskin gloves. It’s a key to an entire world.
Covid restrictions being what they are, Feito can’t have the kind of stranger-hugging, elbow-jostling book release she might’ve hoped for. Still, writing and publishing Mrs. March has qualified as unmitigated “dream come true.”
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” she says, shaking her head with gratitude. “It feels like what I’ve been waiting for since I was a little girl… I know this isn’t what gives us happiness,” she adds, in a humorous attempt at wisdom. “Ultimately that’s only within oneself, blah, blah, blah, whatever.” She laughs. “But I love my job now. I really hope I can keep doing it.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
