Re-Covered: 'She-Crab Soup' by Dawn Langley Simmons

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Virginia Woolf once asked a little boy named Dinky, in the gardens of Sissinghurst Castle, the home of Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West. “A writer,” Dinky replied. As in a fairy tale, the child’s wish came to pass: Dinky, who was born Gordon Langley Hall, the son of Sackville-West’s chauffeur, went on to become the author of twenty books, including She-Crab Soup (1993), a high-camp Southern Gothic novel about the romantic adventures of a wealthy Southern belle—a story as remarkable as the author’s own life.