Neo-Victorian Voices: Opium and Absinthe, Lydia Kang (2020)

I’m all for authors writing about things outside their realm of direct experience (after all, I am a writer of historical fiction!), but it’s wonderful when someone employs expert knowledge from their non-writing career to inspire their novels. In the case of Opium and Absinthe (2020), the latest book I’m reviewing as part of my Neo-Victorian Writers series, author Lydia Kang draws on her medical training as a physician to tell the story of an apparently vampiric murder. 

It’s 1899 in New York City and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has just appeared in the United States when our heroine Tillie Pembroke’s sister, Lucy, is murdered. Lucy’s neck has been punctured and her body is entirely drained of blood. An empty bottle of absinthe is discovered next to her corpse. But, despite these bizarre details, no one except Tillie seems to be investigating the crime. Even Lucy’s fiancé James is more than happy to redirect his romantic attentions towards Tillie and her mother and grandmother just want to avoid a scandal.

Tillie soon finds herself working with a newspaperman, Ian, to uncover the truth, even though she’s not sure she can trust him. But her investigation is hampered not only by the strict social rules she abides by as an upper-class heiress, but by the taste she’s developed for opium while convalescing with a broken collarbone and grieving her sister’s untimely death.

Kang’s plotting is brisk, and her windowpane prose is highly readable, but it’s the wealth of medical information that informs the story which makes Opium and Absinthe a standout among a sea of other 1890s, NYC-set mysteries. Tillie’s spiraling reliance on opioids is particularly well-wrought, although having a protagonist who’s struggling with addiction can be frustrating (just like dealing with someone under the grips of addiction in real life).

Dracula fans will enjoy the intertextual play at work here—in the character names, the chapter epigraphs, and even the inclusion of absinthe in the plot (a nod to the afterlife of Dracula in Hollywood)—but intimate knowledge of Stoker’s classic tale is definitely not a prerequisite. All in, I highly recommend Opium and Absinthe as a fast, fun read for fans of Victoriana.

Which twenty-first-century-written, nineteenth-century-set novel would you like the Secret Victorianist to review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Neo-Victorian Voices: Libertie, Kaitlyn Greenidge (2021)

Most of the twenty-first century written, nineteenth century set novels I’ve read, which are centered on the Black experience in the United States, have focused on the horrors of slavery (see for example, my reviews of Sadeqa Johnson’s Yellow Wife, Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings, Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Wench, and Valerie Martin’s Property). Freedom was presented as a goal, a dream, and a destination for the characters in many of these books, with little page space given over to what freedom looked like, or even could look like, for African Americans during and after the Civil War. 

As the title of Kaitlyn Greenidge’s 2021 novel, Libertie, suggests, this is a book all about freedom. Our title character is a freeborn, Black girl in nineteenth-century Brooklyn. As a child, she witnesses her mother’s role in the Underground Railroad, smuggling enslaved people to the North in coffins. And as she grows and matures, Libertie grapples more and more with what freedom means to her. Is true liberty possible in a country so divided along race lines? Could real freedom mean starting over in the Black-led nation of Haiti? And can she shake free of the life her mother, a white-passing, Black, woman doctor, planned for her? 

This all sounds very lofty, and the novel does deal with complex history and difficult themes, but at the core of Libertie is this quieter story about the fraught, but loving, relationship between mother and daughter. At times I was frustrated with Libertie’s perspective, especially in her teenage years, but Greenidge’s depictions of the misunderstandings between the protagonist and her mother have a sharply observed psychological realism. Libertie has other important relationships too—with the grieving escapee she sees her mother “raise from the dead” at the book’s opening, with a pair of singing, Black, women college students, who she eventually realizes are romantically linked to each other, and with the Haitian man whom she marries—but it is the mother/daughter bond that makes this a compelling character-driven read.

Those who enjoy the intersection of historical fact and fiction may also want to learn more about the inspiration for the character of Libertie’s mother in the novel—Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, who was the third Black woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. 

Which nineteenth century set novel would you like to see me review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. 

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, Enid Shomer (2012)

Moving, surprising and well researched, Enid Shomer’s 2012 The Twelve Rooms of the Nile was my favourite of the books I’ve reviewed this year as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series.

The novel takes an interesting fact—that, before each was famous, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert travelled through Egypt at the same time—and imagines an alternate history, in which they meet, bond and inspire each other’s respective genius.

The result is an intimate double character study set against the sweeping backdrop of nineteenth-century Egypt, borrowing from Flaubert and Nightingale’s own writings, yet elevated further by Shomer’s distinctive and evocative prose (her previous works have been poetry).

The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, Enid Shomer (2012)

You’ll love The Twelve Rooms of the Nile if any of the following apply. You…

Have an interest in Nightingale, Flaubert or both.

Are fascinated by Egyptian mythology and French/British tourism in the nineteenth century.

Enjoy reading love stories that defy conventions of what relationships and intimacy are or should be.

Are interested in fictional depictions of depression, obsession and the artistic temperament.

Have ever felt acutely your difference from those around you or societal and familial expectations of who you should be.

You might find the novel less appealing if you…

Avoid sexual explicitness in (historical) fiction. And I don’t just mean sex scenes—Flaubert is in the midst of writing a treatise on female genitalia.

Want an ‘easy read’—Shomer doesn’t spoon feed and at times she makes you work for it. But rereading and parsing her longer sentences was a joy, not a chore.

Enid Shomer (1944-)

This is the kind of novel that left me feeling bereft when I turned the final page—a testament to the power and immediacy of fiction, even if it’s set in a distant time and place.

Which twenty-first century written, nineteenth-century set novel would you like to see the Secret Victorianist review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Art Review: It’s Alive! Frankenstein at 200, Morgan Library & Museum, New York City

In the summer of 1818, twenty-year-old Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin, although living as ‘Mrs Shelley’ with Percy Bysshe Shelley in Geneva) wrote one of the most culturally influential stories in the English language. Her Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus has spawned countless adaptations across multiple media and has come to be a definitive part of the Gothic and Romantic movements.

The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli (1781)

To mark the bicentenary of the novel’s creation, the Morgan Library & Museum has unveiled a major exhibition dedicated to the work and its influence.

Three Witches, Henry Fuseli (1783)

I began my visit by exploring the Gothic art that inspired Shelley and her contemporaries. Many of these paintings draw upon or suggest narratives, such as Henry Fuseli’s 1781 The Nightmare, in which a demon crouches atop a prostrate woman’s chest, and his 1783 Three Witches, which has influenced subsequent depictions of Shakespeare’s weird sisters. There are also skeletal depictions of Death, such as John Hamilton Mortimer’s drawing of Death on a Pale Horse (c.1775) and multiple instances of men and women attempting resurrections by an open grave.

Death on a Pale Horse, John Hamilton Mortimer (c.1775)

In the next section of the exhibition it’s easy to see synergies between the Gothic imagination and contemporary scientific advancements. Doctors and anatomists are depicted as grave robbers, while artists show their instruments destroying and restoring life, as well as extending it.

The Anatomist Overtaken by the Watch, William Austin (1773)

Parts of the Frankenstein manuscript are on display, as well as letters between the Godwins, Shelleys and others. The romance of the Frankenstein’s creation, and the characters of Shelley, Shelley, Byron and Keats, seem to add to its mystique and appeal, as much as the story itself.

The manuscript

In a second room we move out of the nineteenth century and into Frankenstein’s afterlife in film and graphic novels. We trace the monster’s evolution from reanimated corpse to superhuman villain to participant in superhero-style showdowns. The movies become weather vanes for the sensibilities of their time. For instance, the creature’s accidental child killing appalled audiences in 1931 and so the moment was cut from the film. The bride of Frankenstein (a creature Viktor chooses not to animate in Shelley’s original tale) becomes part of our cultural inheritance—here you can observe her wig, listen to her blood curdling screams.

A poster for the 1931 adaptation

At the centre of the exhibition is Richard Rothwell’s 1840 portrait of Mary Shelley. She watches over proceedings serenely as movie buffs, bibliophiles, and lovers of the macabre file through. I couldn’t help but wonder what she’d think of how Frankenstein and his monster have outlived her and evolved and how amazed she’d be that a tale born out of her time has come to represent so much about generations since.

Mary Shelley, Richard Rothwell (1840)

Which NYC exhibitions should the Secret Victorianist visit next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry (2016)

Sarah Perry’s 2016 The Essex Serpent is a fantasy, but not in the way you might expect from its cover. 

Yes, it deals with the apparent reappearance of a mythical river monster in coastal Essex in 1893. Villagers are drowning, missing and hysterical by turns. There’s definitely something lurking beneath the water.

The Essex Serpent (2016)

But the true fantasy of the novel in its depiction of the nineteenth century. Instead of the oppressive and gloomy setting we’ve come to expect in women-focused historical fiction, Perry’s world is one of glorious possibility, where science and religion harmonise, widowhood brings freedom to roam around the beautifully-described countryside unharassed, and true friendships survive even the messiest of sexual encounters.

The blurb led me to expect a thrilling search for a living fossil, but instead what impressed me most was the novel’s strong impact on my visual imagination. Whether she’s describing rustics skinning moles, a consumptive surrounding herself with beautiful shades of blue, a delectable meal or a sheep stuck in the mud, Perry entrances with her language, pulling you into the pages.

Sarah Perry (1979- )

The Essex Serpent is also a master class in point of view, with Perry moving deftly between her characters’ heads, exposing the nuances and misunderstandings that come with many of our social interactions. Her omniscient voice is the most Victorian aspect of a book, which felt to me, despite critical comparisons of the novel to Dickens, Collins and more, largely modern.

Less successful was the central character, Cora Seaborne, who suffers from two issues often seen in protagonists—an underexplored tragic backstory and an inexplicable ability to make most of the supporting characters fall in love with her. Yet the eccentricity of Cora’s interests (in geology and evolution) and her well-rendered relationship with her (presumably autistic) son keep her interesting. I cared about her story despite these minor quibbles.

One thing I loved about the novel was Perry’s refusal to simplify—to make the characters who believed in religion foolish and those who pursue science bastions of rational progress. Every character in the novel believes in something—in the serpent, counting feathers, housing reform, open heart surgery. And that meant that, while the novel does play at the limits of credulity for a ‘realistic’ work of historical fiction, I kept believing to the end.

Which novel would you like the Secret Victorianist to read next as part of the Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Review: Dr Mütter’s Marvels, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz (2014)

When you think of plastic surgery an image may spring to mind—of heavily botoxed celebrities, or subway commercials for breast enlargements, or Rachel Green pre and post nose job. But Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s engrossing biography of nineteenth-century surgeon, and a plastic surgery pioneer, Thomas Dent Mütter may make you think of the practice entirely differently.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz (1978-)

Mütter (1811-1859) lived in a time when those with ‘deformities’ were outcasts, when birth defects that are fixable today (e.g. cleft palates) determined the course of your entire life, when burns victims were ‘monsters’, kept hidden away from the world by their ashamed families, when terrible conditions in match factories led to ‘phossy jaw’—working class women suffering from painful abscesses, potential brain damage and, ultimately, if left untreated, death.

And he brought them comfort. Mütter’s skill and surgical innovations transformed and saved the lives of many. He removed horns and unsightly tumours. He let burns victims turn their heads (and face society) again. He developed so-called Mütter flap surgery, a technique that survives until today, where flaps of skin remain partially attached to one area, while being grafted onto another, ensuring the body does not reject them.

How Mütter transformed the lives of burns victims

Aptowicz gives us Mütter the ambidextrous maverick, Mütter the innovator, who had the foresight to believe in the importance of hygiene in the surgery room and the crucial nature of patient pre- and post-operative care, and Mütter the teacher—he was the Chair of Surgery at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College (now Thomas Jefferson University) from 1841 until 1856, when poor health expiated his retirement.

But she also gives us Mütter the orphan, who made his way to Paris with very little money to learn from the century’s best physicians, Mütter the dandy, who always had a weakness for extravagant dress, and Mütter the collector, whose lifetime’s store of specimens and oddities went on to form the basis of the museum that now bears his name.

A woman suffering from 'phossy jaw'

Mütter’s story, and the history of medicine more generally, is revealing of many aspects of nineteenth-century American culture. There is, of course, the backdrop of racial tensions and impending civil war (his students would go on to be physicians on the battlefield on both sides of the conflict). There are the attitudes towards women—excluded from the medical establishment, while obstetrics is one of its most important branches, due to the high levels of maternal, and even higher levels of infant, mortality at the time. There’s a particularly gruelling section dealing with the realities of nineteenth-century abortion, and the case of Eliza Sowers, which would go on to have huge ramifications for the legal debate around termination and the ‘personhood’ of the foetus.

To contrast with Mütter, Aptowicz spends a lot of time delving into the life and opinions of his fellow lecturer Charles D. Meigs, Chair of Obstetrics at Jefferson College, who was staunchly conservative in his views. Unlike Mütter, Meigs refused to recognise the role doctors might play in contagion, even as his patients were dying from outbreaks of puerperal fever and his industry peers started to posit theories that would be proven by the advent of microbiology. Meigs also opposed the use of ether, the first anaesthetic (while Mütter was the first to use it for an operation in Philadelphia). He preferred to operate on his patients without any form of pain relief and delivered babies without it, even as women begged for relieving gas, as he saw labouring pains as a God-given trial for his female patients.

Thomas Dent Mütter

Aptowicz’s biography could have come off as macabre and voyeuristic, the literary equivalent of a nineteenth-century freak show, but throughout she remains true to the humanity of her subjects, using the same care with which Mütter treated his samples, which he often ‘saved’ from being seen as horrors to form part of his educational collection. But it’s a shame she hasn’t more information to delve into about Mütter’s personal life. While his views on medicine, and his personality as a teacher, come alive throughout, his relationships, especially with his wife Mary, are still shrouded in obscurity.

Mütter died when he was forty-seven but his life had a profound effect on the medical establishment, his patients, his students and Philadelphia. ‘Ambition…is like the sun,’ he wrote. ‘It gives life and heat to all around.’ Aptowicz’s work shows us just how far ambition (if you were an educated white man) could take you in nineteenth-century America, in spite of poverty, ill health and bad luck, and how much we owe to pioneering doctors like Mütter in medical practice today.

What would you like to see the Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.