The American writer Virginia C. Andrews was born Cleo Virginia Andrews, in Portsmouth, Virginia. Known popularly as V.C. Andrews, she became a novelist late in life, having previously worked as a commercial artist, illustrator, and portrait painter. Flowers in the Attic (1979), which she wrote an early draft of in 1975, became a bestseller, although The Washington Post declared the book “deranged swill” and Andrews possibly the “worst writer I have ever read.” However, for leagues of teenage girls, Andrews became in the words of The Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers, the “Emily Brontë of the MTV generation.” Gillian Flynn, author of the 2012 crime bestseller Gone Girl, said that the mother and grandmother characters in Flowers in the Attic spawned her fascination with “wicked women […] It felt so new […] to me—these witches who seemed quite real.” Andrews, who wrote her novel in two weeks, claimed that it was not autobiographical. However, as a sufferer of arthritis who had to spend much of her life in isolation with chronic back pain, Andrews admitted that many of Cathy’s feelings about her confinement arose from her own real-life feelings.

Andrews defended her sensationalist plots in a 1985 Faces of Fear interview, saying “I think I tell a whopping good story. […] When I read, if a book doesn’t hold my interest in what’s going to happen next, I put it down and don’t finish it. So I’m not going to let anybody put one of my books down and not finish it. My stuff is a very fast read.” Certainly, Flowers in the Attic, with its multiple intrigues and loose ends, extends its plot over into the sequels Petals on the Wind (1980), If There Be Thorns (1981), as well as into the prequel Garden of Shadows, (1987). Flowers in the Attic, which captivated so many readers, became movies in 1987 and 2014, and a play in 2014, written by Andrews’s ghostwriter, Andrew Neiderman. Further, Neiderman created two books entitled Christopher’s Diary: Secrets of Foxworth (2014) and Christopher’s Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger (2015), which show the brother’s side of the Flowers in the Attic story, as the book continues to live on in the cultural imagination.

The family saga, Gothic-style horror, picturesque Southern surroundings, and theme of incest in Flowers in The Attic are features of Andrews’s books and those that Neiderman penned in her name. As well as The Dollanganger series, Andrews in her lifetime authored My Sweet Audrina (1982) and the first two books in the Casteel series, Heaven (1985) and Dark Angel (1986). Andrews died of breast cancer in December 1986, having sold 24 million books, after which her ghost-writer Andrew Neiderman took charge of finishing her incomplete novels, and of writing further books in her style.

Plot Summary

Cathy Dollanganger lives a charmed life with her father Chris, her mother, Corrine, her elder brother, Christopher, and her younger twin siblings, Cory and Carrie. When Chris dies in a traffic accident, Corrine insists on moving the family from Pennsylvania to Virginia, to live with her splendidly wealthy parents. Cathy, who is 12 at this time, finds out that Corrine’s parents disinherited her because she married her half-uncle Chris, and her fanatically religious grandparents considered such an incestuous union a sin. Corrine hopes that by moving back to Virginia and repairing her relationship with her ailing father, Malcolm, she will stand a chance of being written back into his will. However, he does not know about her four children, and Corrine fears that if he learns about them, he will completely dismiss her claim.

As a result, Corrine collaborates with her formidable mother to hide the children in the north wing of the mansion, where they will be unnoticed by the servants and have access to the attic. While the children protest their confinement, along with grandmother’s strict rules, which display a fixation on Biblical morality and maintaining a distance from siblings of the opposite sex, their mother placates them with gifts and promises that they will be released as soon as their grandfather is dead. She also tells them that she will go to secretarial school and find a means of supporting the family herself.

As the months in captivity pass, grandfather shows no signs of dying, or Corrine of becoming a secretary. Instead, Corrine visits the children less frequently, but always appears lavishly dressed, as she has been reintroduced to society and started dating. Meanwhile, the children read and educate themselves, and have vicarious access to the outside world through the television that Corrine has brought them. Over time, the twins weaken and fail to develop, while Cathy and Chris, as her elder brother comes to be called, are flooded with teenage hormones. Discussing love often, and feeling that they are missing out on adolescence, Chris and Cathy develop sexual feelings towards each other. One day, while Cathy is admiring the changes that puberty has brought about in the bathroom mirror, she discovers that Chris has been watching her. At that moment, the grandmother strides in, demanding to know how often Cathy has allowed Chris to “use” her body (243). She insists that Cathy cut her hair and rid herself of sinful vanity. Cathy refuses, but wakes up in the night to find that grandmother has put tar in her hair. Chris helps her wash it out, and her hair eventually recovers. Meanwhile, they exchange a kiss, and pet.

When Corrine eventually reappears after a long absence, she is distant from the children and resentful that they question her motives. It transpires that in her absence, she married her suitor Bart Winslow. As Cathy and Chris begin to lose faith in their mother, they take it in turns to go the room she shares with Bart to steal some money and prepare to escape. When Cathy goes on a stealing mission, she sees her handsome new stepfather in a chair asleep and cannot resist kissing him. When Chris goes on the following occasion, he is furious because he has overheard Bart telling their mother about his dream of a young girl who came and kissed him in the middle of the night. Chris instantly knows that Bart was talking about Cathy, and in a fit of jealousy, Chris takes possession of Cathy and rapes her. He later tells Cathy that she will be the only woman he loves for the rest of his life.

When Cory sickens to a greater degree, Cathy worries that it is a punishment from God for her and Chris’s incestuous act. When grandmother and Corrine enter, Cathy insists that they take Cory to a hospital. Unfortunately, it is too late, and Cory dies, reportedly from pneumonia. The next time Chris goes on one of his stealing missions, he discovers that Corrine and Bart’s bedroom is completely empty, and that they have left. Then, he sneaks into the library and overhears two servants discussing how grandfather had been dead for months, and that Corrine was written back into his will on the condition that she had no children. Chris then learns that Corrine was planning to escape with the money and without the children. He also gleans that Corrine was to blame for Cory’s death, because the powdered sugar on the donuts she provided for them was laced with arsenic, and she had a stronger motive for killing the children than grandmother. Chris, Cathy, and Carrie escape the house, with their clothes and the money they have collected. They take a train South, and hope to make a new life for themselves.