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V. C. Andrews - TV Tropes

  • ️Fri Oct 26 2012

V. C. Andrews (Creator)

"Look, I'm not pretending this woman is Tolstoy. But she's a fantastic storyteller with a world view. What separates the writers who really hit is a world view. Plot is not ultimately enough. Flowers is not really a plot novel; it is a novel of sensibility, perception and, in a funny way, introspection."

— V.C. Andrews' editor Ann Patty

Cleo Virginia Andrews, better known as V.C. Andrews (June 6, 1923 – December 19, 1986), was an American author, mainly known for family-themed Thrillers.

A voracious reader as well as a skilled artist and designer, Andrews didn't really get serious about writing until she hit middle age. After finishing quite a few unpublished manuscripts, her debut novel Flowers in the Attic came out in 1979, and quickly gained notoriety for a subplot involving Brother–Sister Incest, but that infamy translated into huge sales. In its wake, Andrews wrote several sequels and produced other novels. Plagued with health problems throughout her life, Andrews died of breast cancer at age 63 in 1986. She never married, nor had children.

Andrews has since become perhaps equally notorious for the manner in which her work has Outlived Its Creator. The real Virginia Andrews published only seven books in her lifetime. After her death, however, a ghostwriter (Andrew Neiderman) quietly took over at her publishers' behest, and has continued to churn out novels under the Andrews pen-name for decades ever since, basically turning "V.C. Andrews" into a brand. Quite where the lines are drawn between any genuine unfinished manuscripts he may have completed, works "inspired by" her ideas but otherwise his own, and works entirely plucked from his imagination, remains officially unacknowledged. More than seventy books by him have appeared under the Andrews name, though — over ten times more than the original author ever managed, and unabating even as the centenary of her birth has now come and gone.

It is widely agreed by V.C. Andrews fans that Only the Creator Does It Right, and there is a particular disdain for Neiderman. The original books she actually wrote are something of a Cult Classic.

In 2022 Neiderman published a biography of Andrews, The Woman Beyond the Attic.

Works:

Tropes that apply to her:

  • Moustache de Plume: The reason she was Only Known by Initials. She said in a 1985 interview:

    Virginia: The publisher sent me a copy of the galley of Flowers in the Attic, and it read "Virginia Andrews." Then, when they sent me the cover, it said, "V.C. Andrews." So I immediately called up and complained. And they said, "It was a big mistake by the printers, and we can't change it—we've already printed a million copies of the cover and it's too expensive to throw them away." Then later, I learned the truth. It was an editorial decision. Men don't like to read women writers, and they wanted men to read the book. They wanted to prove to men that women could write differently—that we don't write only about ribbons and frills and kisses and hugs, that we can really write something strong. Outside of the US where V.C. Andrews was marketed toward women, the books were published under the name "Virginia Andrews." Ironically, since her cult status has risen after her death, some of these foreign editions have changed the name to her more familiar (in the US) initials.

  • Posthumous Credit: Flowers in the Attic (1987) was released about a year after Andrews' death (she helped out in pre-production, but died during production). She appears in a single shot in the film as a maid washing a window.

Tropes common in her works:

  • Big Fancy House: Foxworth Hall in the Dollanganger Series, Farthinggale Manor in the Casteel Series, and Whitefern in My Sweet Audrina.
  • Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Foxworths are slightly ahead of the Tattertons in terms of incest and insanity, but only because they've been at it longer. Yet the Adares of My Sweet Audrina manage to pack a lot of crazy in a fairly small house.
  • Died on Their Birthday:
    • Flowers in the Attic: At the beginning of the story, Christopher, Sr. is killed in a car crash while driving to his 36th birthday party.
    • Petals on the Wind: Julia kills Scotty on his 3rd birthday as part of a Murder-Suicide. They both drown.
    • My Sweet Audrina: The first Audrina dies on her 9th birthday on September 9.
  • Domestic Abuse: Another thing she is famous for. While her plots may be soap-opera like, her depictions of abuse—and even more, people's reactions to said abuse—are chillingly realistic.
  • Dysfunction Junction: Good luck finding a character in her work who doesn't have deep psychological damage.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: The classic Andrews trope is "young girl in desperate situation dreams of better life; works, struggles, and schemes to achieve her dreams; finds out her dreams are actually even worse than the life she just escaped; repeat for five books." The lucky V.C. Andrews heroines make peace with their pasts, but rarely do they reach a happily-ever-after.
  • The Film of the Book: Flowers in the Attic had a modestly successful big screen adaptation released in 1987. More recently, Lifetime has produced an extensive Made-for-TV Movie series of Andrews adaptations, starting with a well-received Flowers remake in 2014, though after running out of the actual Andrews-penned books they've turned to adaptations of the Neiderman books. Neiderman's Rain also got a feature adaptation in 2006.
  • Generational Saga: Both the Dollanganger and Casteel series.
  • Genre-Busting: Andrews' work is hard to classify because it skirts the edges of a bunch of genres but doesn't fit into them. Andrews basically felt she was a genre unto herself, and other commentators like writer Sara Gran agree.

    "Though there’s an obvious debt to the Brontë sisters, nineteenth-century sensation novels like Lady Audley's Secret, and Daphne du Maurier's Gothic fiction, at heart Andrews’s novels have little in common with the genres where they ought to fit. They’re too offbeat for romance, too slow to qualify as thrillers, too explicit for Gothic, and far too dark and complex for young adult. Many booksellers shelve them with horror, but Andrews’s concerns with family, emotion, and relationships put her books firmly outside the genre. Although the supernatural makes brief appearances in Andrews’s work, her largest topic is the all-too-natural tragedy of families gone wrong."

  • Gothic Horror: Andrews was credited for codifying the "children in peril" genre, in which children are frequently the victims or prisoners of their own caregivers, often with lots of Gothic trappings (grand, labyrinthine houses, convoluted family secrets, and so forth).
  • Missing Episode: Andrews wrote several books in her lifetime that were never published. These included the 800-page long The Obsessed (mistakenly believed to be the original transcript for Flowers in the Attic for years before it was cleared up by Andrews' editor), a 900-hundred page medieval romance called Castles of the Damned, and a story titled All the Gallant Snowflakes. Allegedly, the manuscripts were shelved because they deviated from the 'Children in Distress' type stories that made Andrews famous. Of the stuff that was published in her lifetime, the short story "I Slept With My Uncle On My Wedding Night" was only published in a pulp magazine, and Andrews never revealed the magazine's name for fear that her family might read it.
  • "Reading Is Cool" Aesop: It's not merely that Cathy and Heaven both love reading, but—more specifically—that they both use the escapism of stories as a way to cope. Virginia was a writer and book lover, after all.
  • Shock Party: There's a party, everyone is gathered to celebrate, and then disaster strikes. Maybe the person whose birthday it is never arrives to the party. Maybe the guests don't arrive. Maybe someone makes a scene. But almost every party in her books goes awry in one way or another.
  • Southern Gothic: Foxworth Hall in the Dollanganger books is located in Virginia, and as a result the stories broadly fit the category, even if they don't really display the conventions of the genre.
  • Theme Naming: The book collections have names with a noticeable theme: The Dollanganger Series has floral names ("Flowers", "Petals", "Thorns," "Seeds," "Garden") while the Casteel Series uses angelic themes ("Heaven", "Angel,").
  • Troubled Abuser: There is often a cycle of abuse in place, and many of the abusers are victims themselves.
  • Very Loosely Based on a True Story:
    • According to a family member, Andrews got the inspiration for Flowers in the Attic from a doctor of hers that she had a crush on, who supposedly (along with his siblings) was hidden away in a house for several years.
    • The Casteel series was allegedly based on the life story of a real woman who grew up in poverty and whose father sold her and her siblings. This story, however, wasn't quite up to snuff, so the basic premise was supposedly handed over to Andrews, who expanded and dramatized it.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • In one of her rare interviews, Andrews stated that she had outlines for dozens of future works, some in other genres (including an epic medieval romance), and was very interested in publishing other kinds of books once her contracted "children in peril" series were complete. Sadly, she never lived to fulfill the contract.
    • Gods Of Green Mountain, which was actually Andrews' first novel, was planned to be published in the 1980s as a trilogy. Andrews' death put an end to those plans and the book was published in its full form in eBook format in 2003, when Andrews had been dead for almost 20 years.