Obviously she cut the time back in her novel to be more believable. He and his siblings had been locked away in the attic for over six years to preserve the family wealth. While she was there, she developed a crush on her young doctor. Virginia was a young lady when my dad made arrangements to take Virginia to the University of Virginia hospital for treatment. For many years there was no evidence to support this claim and the book was passed off as fiction until the official Virginia Andrews website made contact with one of Virginia’s relatives who claimed “Flowers In The Attic was based on a true story. The books were much disputed when the series was said to be based on a true story.

The second and third Dollenganger books document a cycle of abuse which most child psychologists would recognise as the sins of the father – or in this case mother – being visited upon the sons. But the surviving children have their revenge at the wedding.

While the grandmother mistreats the little darlings, their mother finds a new beau and makes plans to marry him. This leads to the formation of a new family unit among the children themselves. Their mother’s abandonment forces the children to rely on one another for comfort and friendship. They turn it into their own paper-made garden with flowers and animals. The children initially spend most of their time decorating the attic to make it less scary. There she locks her offspring in the attic because her father does not like children, indeed, he does not even know that she has four blond beauties. The Dollengangers are a bright, happy, one-parent family until mother decides to move them all to her parents home. All these novels explore, among other things, aspects of child abuse and incest. It was followed by three more books about the Dollenganger family – Petals On The Wind (1980), If There Be Thorns (1981), and Garden Of Shadows (1986), the prequel to Flowers In The Attic. Published in 1979, it received tremendous acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Flowers In The Attic, based on a true story, was her first novel and became an immediate best-seller.

Often described inaccurately as horror novels, her tales reveal the dark side of human nature, mixing Dickensian motivations with Gothic melodrama to create a hybrid fiction that has kept her worldwide audience (both male and female) on tenterhooks throughout her relatively brief career. Although she passed away in December 1986, Virginia Andrews‘ name lives on as one of the world’s biggest selling novelists, with over seventy million copies of her books and stories in print.

Flowers in the attic novel