“Why, when October comes round,” Virginia Woolf famously complained in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” “do the publishers always fail to supply us with a masterpiece?” Of the incompetent writers of her day, she went on to remark, “their sincerity is desperate, and their courage tremendous; it is only that they do not know which to use, a fork or their fingers.” One might wonder if Mrs. Woolf would be surprised today to observe how grimly durable her complaints have proved; they are certainly no less pertinent now, and may even be pointed, ironically, toward this first attempt at fiction by her own great-niece, Henrietta Garnett.

Family Skeletons has three settings, all isolated and all travelogue-beautiful: an estate in Ireland called Malabay, a vaguely Swiss mountain clinic, and an island. The book supplies slightly more characters than settings: all are either beautiful or charmingly eccentric. There is Catherine (beautiful), who has lived her seventeen years in wild innocence at Malabay with her horses and her uncle Pake (eccentric). There is her cousin Tara, ten years older than she. (“Tara was beautiful. He was not just good looking, but beautiful.”) Tara has a real zest for living; he tends to say things like “The parsley is perfection” and “I’ve had more lovers than you’ve had hot dinners.” He marries Catherine and then promptly gets himself drowned in the same lake where Catherine’s parents, Nellie and Terence, died in a sailing accident many years before. Tara’s friend Gerald,