Word: daughters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wise Virgin is about a few months in the life of Giles Fox, a medievalist who lost his eyesight after 18 years of labor on a scholarly edition of A Treatise of Heavenly Love, a 13th century meditation on virginity. Two virgins attend him: his pretty, unworldly teen-age daughter Tibba, named for a 6th century East Saxon princess, and Louise, his frumpy, incompetent, adoring assistant. (The manuscript is imaginary, and Wilson, who has taught Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, has fun cooking up swatches of 13th century English.) Giles and Tibba live in a bare house in Islington ruled...
...once into the Islington redoubt. Giles is swept into Louise's ample embrace and hauled off to a humiliating weekend in Cambridge, the place where he failed to get tenure years before and where her thesis was summarily rejected more recently. As their lives get messier, father and daughter start to turn on each other...
...legend, two brothers. Sharyar and Shah Zaman, who reign over adjoining kingdoms, discover their wives infidelity and vow that, in retaliation, each will rape a virgin every night and have her killed in the morning. Sharyar's kingdom soon deteriorates as parents flee the country with their daughters. At last, Scheherazade, a local visor's eldest daughter, announces to her father that she has a plan to end the King's murders and he, therefore, must present her to him that night as the virgin...
...cheerlessness is relieved by precise, almost finicky writing, and a dark humor that accentuates the drumbeats of disappointment. In "Coach," the father eagerly tries to tell his daughter Daphne that he is, quite possibly, going to be made coach of the college varsity football team--but Daphne passes by him in the doorway...
...glided through the sanctuary; then came a clown, carrying balloons, who began skipping around the coffin chanting, "Today my brother and sister are dancing together in heaven." The mother, already deeply offended and in tears, only later realized that the clown's voice was that of her own daughter. After the daughter tied the balloons to the coffin, pallbearers in work shirts carried the coffin to the dead man's Chevrolet pickup truck...