The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter
Page 37
MARY: I told you so.
But Mrs. Shelley also did something else: in her Biography, Justine is never created. Frankenstein decides a female monster would be too dangerous, and throws her body parts into the sea.
Why did Mary Shelley never join the Société des Alchimistes? Because she was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and the stepsister of Claire Clairmont, whom Lord Byron was treating as a mistress he had already tired of. He would later abandon her daughter Allegra, who died in a convent in Italy. She knew the truth: that Frankenstein had created a female monster, and that the female monster had escaped. And she hid that truth. Knowing of Justine, she did the best she could, for another woman. She erased her from the story.
MARY: That’s highly speculative, you know.
CATHERINE: But I’m convinced it’s true. Look at the sympathy with which she wrote of Justine Moritz.
That summer, Mary Shelley was only nineteen. She had run away from home with Percy, who was already an acclaimed poet. She was in the home of the famous and scandalous Lord Byron, among men who were learned and powerful. And in their midst, she did something revolutionary. She allowed Justine to write her own story.
JUSTINE: I like to think it’s true, and that in her own way, Mary Shelley was also a sister to me. . . .
As I’ve written this book, I’ve sometimes wondered what she would have thought of us and our adventures, and of course the book itself. I think she would have excused its defects (yes, Mary, I know there are some, don’t act so astonished) and praised it as an accurate portrayal of a group of women trying to get along in the world as best they can, like women anywhere—even if they are monsters. Sometimes I imagine her sitting in my room, in the chair by the window, as I write—marveling at the typewriter and how much faster it is than a quill pen! Whenever I’m not sure what to say, when the words don’t come and I sit there staring at my notebook, she says something encouraging, one author to another. I swear, sometimes I can see the shadow she casts. . . . And then I nod at the chair, as though she were really present, and get back to writing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel began as a question I asked myself while writing my doctoral dissertation: Why did so many of the mad scientists in nineteenth-century narratives create, or start creating but then destroy, female monsters? I didn’t get a chance to answer that question within the dissertation itself, so I tried to answer it here, in a different way.
This novel would not exist without the help of a great many people. I would like to thank John Paul Riquelme and Julia Prewitt Brown, the first and second readers of my dissertation, for letting me write about monsters, and for their tireless patience with a graduate student who was already, at that point, transmuting into a writer. Before this was a novel, it was a short story called “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter.” I’m grateful to Karen Meisner, who purchased and edited it for Strange Horizons, and to John Joseph Adams, who reprinted it in The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination.
Once I started writing the novel version, Alexandra Duncan and Nathan Ballingrud workshopped an early draft of the first three chapters. Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Catherynne M. Valente, and C. S. E. Cooney read and commented on a later draft of those chapters; they showed me who my characters were and how I could write the rest of the novel. Haddayr Copley-Woods generously read the entire novel once it was drafted. This novel would not exist in its current form without their smart, honest, and insightful feedback, and I am so grateful for their help. During the writing process, I traveled twice to England to do the necessary research. Thank you to Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James for letting me stay in their beautiful house in London, and for suggesting so many of the resources I ended up using. And thank you as well to Terri Windling for showing me her lovely corner of Devon, so I could get a sense for the countryside Justine travels through. Finally, many thanks to Joy Marchand for a lesson on translating into Latin.
My agent, Barry Goldblatt, was involved with this project from the beginning: we started talking about it long before I wrote the first draft. I’d like to thank him for his faith in me and this novel, and for waiting so patiently until it was done. And a heartfelt thank-you to my editor, Navah Wolfe, who saw all the places my manuscript could be stronger, as well as the entire team at Saga Press who created the book you hold in your hands, including Bridget Madsen, Tatyana Rosalia, and Krista Vossen. I’m also grateful to Kate Forrester, who created a cover illustration more perfect than I could have imagined.
Finally, my thanks to Kendrick Goss, who waved away my doubts, and most of all to Ophelia Goss, who read the final draft before it was submitted and told me that she liked my girl monsters. This book is written for her. It is so much better for the help of all the people who have read and commented on it in one form or another. Its mistakes and deficiencies are, of course, my own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PHOTO COPYRIGHT © 2017 BY MATTHEW STEIN PHOTOGRAPHY
THEODORA GOSS is a Hungarian American writer of fantasy short stories. Her story “Singing of Mount Abora” won the 2008 World Fantasy Award for short fiction, and her work has been nominated for many other major awards, including the 2006 Nebula Award for “Pip and the Fairies.” She won the 2004 Rhysling Award for Best Long Poem for “Octavia Is Lost in the Hall of Masks.” Her collection In the Forest of Forgetting was published in 2006 by Prime Books. Visit her at theodoragoss.com.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Theodora Goss
Jacket illustration copyright © 2017 by Kate Forrester
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Jacket art direction by Krista Vossen
Interior design by Brad Mead
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goss, Theodora, author.
Title: The strange case of the alchemist’s daughter / Theodora Goss.
Description: New York : Saga Press, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031398 (print) | LCCN 2016038043 (eBook) | ISBN 9781481466509 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781481466523 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Holmes, Sherlock—Fiction. | Watson, John H. (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | Secret societies—Fiction. | Alchemists—Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3607.O8544 S77 2017 (print) | LCC PS3607.O8544 (eBook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
> LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031398