by E. J. Levy
In token of my understanding of sex as socially scripted, my novel tips the pen to other novels of female education. In several places I allude to passages from books by Jane Austen and Elena Ferrante about female heroism and education so as to put my book in conversation with those others and to remind us that the novel—like sex, gender, race—is a narrative construction, to some extent, and that, to some extent, we may choose to follow or defy or rewrite these scripts. Specifically, the opening of Northanger Abbey informs my passage “No one who had ever seen…”; The Story of a New Name informs two descriptions of Barry in Edinburgh: “I arrived at the university…” and “I was not yet eighteen.…”
When I first drafted the book in 2012–2016, I was unaware of Jeremy Dronfield and Michael du Preez’s impressive research that found Dr. Barry’s mother alive, if not exactly well, years after they parted in Edinburgh, so in my novel she is not. There is debate among biographers about when Margaret was pregnant, whether as an adult or a child; I side with biographer Rachel Holmes in representing this as likely having occurred in 1819, when Barry left Cape Town for Mauritius for an unexplained absence.
I have relied upon the admirably thorough research of scholars and biographers whose books have helped me immeasurably; I owe a particular debt to Rachel Holmes’s The Secret Life of Dr. James Barry: Victorian England’s Most Eminent Surgeon for countless details. Her descriptions of Barry’s attire (“emerald-striped jacket…”) and the road to the Xhosa (“more rock than road”) echo in my own. Late in the writing process, I had the good fortune to consult Dr. James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time, a masterly biography by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield, which clarified many matters large and small; I am grateful to its authors and highly recommend it. Other works consulted include Jane Austen’s England: Daily Life in the Georgian and Regency Periods by Roy and Lesley Adkins; Bolívar: American Liberator by Marie Arana; The Cape Journals of Lady Anne Barnard, 1797–1798; The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists by Crane Brinton; Digging Up the Dead: Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon by Druin Burch; Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern by Carol Dinshaw; Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns, edited by Laine E. Doggett and Daniel E. O’Sullivan; Our Tempestuous Day: A History of Regency England by Carolly Erickson; Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto-Sterling; Alexander Hamilton’s Outlines of the Theory and Practice of Midwifery; A Manual of Military Surgery: Or, Hints on the Emergencies of Field, Camp and Hospital by Samuel David Gross; William Harvey’s On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, translated by Robert Willis, revised and edited by Alexander Bowie; Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre by Ann Heilmann; Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud by Thomas Laqueur; “The Vanished Source: Gossip and Absence in the Cape of Good Hope ‘Placard Scandal’ of 1824” by Kirsten McKenzie, History, University of Sydney, ANZLH E-Journal, Refereed Paper No. 6; Plantagenet in South Africa: Lord Charles Somerset by Anthony Kendal Millar; The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800–1929 by Ornella Moscucci; An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England by Venetia Murray; “No. 36 Castle Street East: A Reconstruction of James Barry’s House, painting and printmaking studio, and the making of ‘The Birth of Pandora’” by Michael Phillips, The British Art Journal 9.1 (Spring 2008); What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist—the Facts of Daily Life in 19th-Century England by Daniel Pool (whose description of London docks is echoed in my own: “Cart and carriage wheels…”); English Society in the 18th Century by Roy Porter; Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution by Karen Racine; “Slave Orchestras and Rainbow Balls: Colonial Culture and Creolisation at the Cape of Good Hope, 1750–1838” by Anne Marieke van der Wal, in Identity, Intertextuality, and Performance in Early Modern Song Culture by D. E. van der Poel, Louis P. Grijp, and Wim van Anrooij; The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole; Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft.
I was moved to write historical fiction by the brilliant novelist Ellis Avery—and her book The Last Nude—whose example on and off the page continues to inspire; you are missed. Other novels influenced me as I wrote as well: Lily King’s Euphoria; Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair; Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day; Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, and Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body.
This book would not have been written without the generous support of many individuals and institutions: I am grateful for a 2016 F.C. Wood Institute Travel Grant from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and for time in the Historical Medical Library and Mütter Museum; for a 2014 Faculty Development Fund Award from Colorado State University (CSU) for time to research and revise; for an invaluable 2012 Professional Development Program Grant from CSU, which enabled crucial travel and early research; Aspen Summer Words Fellowship; Sewanee’s Walter E. Dakin Fellowship; my deep thanks to wonderful Chair Louann Reid and my inspiring colleagues and students at Colorado State University; I am especially grateful to Dr. Lynn Shutters for articles on medieval sexuality and gender, and to Liz van Hoose, who told me of the reliquary and whose wonderful advice I tried but failed to take. I am deeply grateful.
My profound thanks go to my brilliant agent, the calm and calming Maria Massie, who introduced me (and Dr. Barry) to my dream editor, Judith Clain. I am incredibly grateful to be working with an editor whose books I have read and admired for years as I wrote my own. This book is markedly better for the keen insights and hard work of Miya Kumangai and the wonderful team at Little, Brown, especially the sainted Michael Noon, Pamela Marshall, and Sabrina Callahan; and the witty Allan Fallow. Thanks, too, to Kimberly Burns and Aileen Boyle.
I owe a debt to the Writers of the Purple Loins, whom I was trying to charm when I began this, hoping with each chapter to woo you; for crucial medical advice in a time of pandemic, my deep gratitude to Dr. Cris Munoz; to Aspen Summer Words and Sewanee friends, who continue to inspire; to all who rallied on behalf of this book—heartfelt thanks; thanks to the Kenyon Review crew, both students and colleagues; my thanks to Frank Culbertson, Ted and Kate Kronmiller, Amy and Chris Shank, Céline Leroy, and Nathalie Zberro for your faith and ongoing support; thanks to Nicholas Delbanco, who long ago bet on the horse, and to the immortal Lee K. Abbott; thanks also to Glenda Morgan, who first told me unforgettable stories of the Cape.
My deepest thanks to the family and friends who sustain me in perilous times and celebrate the good ones: my parents, Seymour Levy and Virginia Mae Riggs Levy (who was a heroine all along); Howard Levy, Sawnie Morris and Brian Shields, Lisa Schamess, Dr. Amy Weil, Susan Rosen, Steven Schwartz, Emily Hammond, Stephanie G’Schwind, and above all Maureen Stanton, brilliant writer, best friend, who inspires me daily both as a writer and a person, who has kept the faith and always takes my calls at the help line; neither this book nor I would be here without you; to my beloved partner, Bill, for whom I’m grateful daily, even as we make a most unlikely pair; and to our beloved daughter, Sophia, who—like William Harvey—has changed my understanding of the workings of the human heart.
Discover Your Next Great Read
Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite authors.
Tap here to learn more.
About the Author
E. J. Levy has been featured in The Paris Review, the New York Times, and Best American Essays, among other publications, and has received a Pushcart Prize. Her debut story collection—Love, in Theory—won the 2012 Flannery O’Connor Award and the 2014 Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award. Her anthology, Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers, won a Lambda Literary Award. She holds a degree in History from Yale and earned an MFA from Ohio State University, where she was the first creative writer to receive a Presidential Fellowship. Levy teaches in the MFA Program at Colorado
State University.
