It’s a murder mystery. It’s a tour de force of nineteenth century literature and history. It’s a romp in the world of Sherlock Holmes. The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter is all these, making it one of the most deeply entertaining novels I’ve read in years. At the same time—if you read closely and between the lines, there are greater rewards in store: award-winning author Theodora Goss brings a wealth of insight and literary mastery to make this more than your average murder mystery or period novel. It manages to be a smooth, blissful ride, while simultaneously weaving a rich tapestry of ideas.
In the world of The Strange Case of Alchemist’s Daughter, the classics of supernatural literature are real: Frankenstein’s monster, Mr. Hyde, Professor Rapaccini, Dr. Moreau. But this is the women’s story—the daughters and creations of these famous men. And what they have to say about the old stories, and about women, is subtly, brilliantly illuminating for our time. Each is a memorable character in her own right, with a delightful voice that is all her own.
I caught up with Theodora to ask about the themes and inspirations in this novel, as well as the research she engaged in to bring Sherlock Holmes’s London to vivid life. And there is good news for her readers—a sequel is on the way!
One of my favorite aspects of the book is that each woman has her own unmistakable voice, and each contributes something different to the group. This even includes Mrs. Poole and Alice, who would normally be side characters. How did these voices come into being?
They developed over time. Before I wrote the novel, I wrote a novella called "The Mad Scientist's Daughter" that was published in the online magazine Strange Horizons. It focused on Mary Jekyll, Diana Hyde, Catherine Moreau, Beatrice Rappaccini, Justine Frankenstein, and another character named Helen Vaughan who didn't make it into the novel (at least, not as a member of the Athena Club). The novella was metafictional, much more so than the novel. (I think you can get away with that sort of thing more easily in shorter fiction.) Quite a lot of it was dialog, and that's when the voices of the main characters started coming through clearly. But to find them, I had to do what actors do--imagine myself into the characters. If I were a woman made out of a puma on Dr. Moreau's island, like Catherine, what sort of personality would I have? What if I were poisonous and could never touch another human being, like Beatrice? How would that change and shape me? Mrs. Poole and Alice came along much later, when I started writing the novel, and actually Mrs. Poole was not going to be such a prominent character. But she kept talking . . . At some point, it really did feel as though the characters started taking over and telling me what to write. If I was stuck in a particular part of the novel, I would ask myself how Catherine, who is ultimately the author, would write it.
It struck me that this book follows a single unassailable law: Not one woman is a cipher, ever. Here is a story reminiscent of Jack the Ripper where women are victims, but the victims have identities, as does the prostitute witness. Whenever a woman is introduced, even tangentially, she always given dimension and human motivation. Would you say this is correct?
I hope so! And actually, I hope it's true of all the characters, male and female. Even if they appear for three sentences, you should be able to see them as people who are going to have lives outside the narrative. That comes from two influences, one negative, one positive. The negative influence is quite a lot of fantasy literature in which there are expendable characters. For example, there's big battle and a lot of people die, but no one particularly cares--the battle exists to further the main character's development or something like that. I really hate that, because in the real world, when you have a big battle, each life lost is an individual tragedy. When you walk down the street, every person you see has a story of his or her own. So I tried to have no expendable people. I mean, the novel itself is not particularly dark, but I did want to give the sense that every character who shows up is an individual, so every death matters. The positive influence comes from writers like Agatha Christie and Charles Dickens, who manage to very quickly characterize every single person who shows up in their narratives, so it feels as though you're walking through a world of real, three-dimensional people. I tried to do that as well.
A great deal of research seems to have gone into this book—not siphoned out in long descriptions but seamlessly, in service to the story. Plus you have a PhD, so it seems imperative that I ask about your research for this book!
I did a lot of research. Actually, when I started the book, I thought it was going to be easier than it turned out to be. After all, I had a PhD in Victorian literature! That meant I was an expert, right? Not so . . . I was not an expert on how many pence go into a shilling go into a pound. I did not know how much a handkerchief, not too cheap to be suitable for a lady like Mary Jekyll, would cost, or what a doctor like John Watson would use to clean a wound. I did not know which London train station one goes to in order to catch a train to Purfleet, or how many people fit into a horse-drawn cab (I actually made a mistake on that and had to rewrite some paragraphs late in the process). When I started, I wasn't even quite sure what an omnibus looked like. So in a sense, I had to start all over again from a different perspective--how would my characters move around London? What would they know? What would their frames of reference be? For example, if Mary Jekyll wants to point out that something is expensive, she might say it cost a whole guinea. If she notices the smoothness of a train journey, she might say it's so much nicer than riding in a charabanc. Sometimes I had to stop in the middle of a sentence to make sure I had gotten a detail right. It was a very different way of looking at research. I used reference books about the time period, original material online (especially old maps and photographs), and literary sources (such as the Holmes stories). I also went to London twice to walk around the locations where the action is set, including the Sherlock Holmes museum, which isn't at 221B, but is on Baker Street. Hopefully, readers won't notice the research except in passing—it really should be invisible. But it was a fun and sometimes arduous part of the process.
What do you think of the idea that Mary Jekyll’s housekeeper, Mrs. Poole is an inversion, or a response, to Sherlock Holmes’s housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson? Mrs. Hudson is the motherly figure in the background of Conan Doyle’s stories, unobtrusively supporting Holmes’s lifestyle. In contrast, while Mrs. Poole is essential not only for what she does in the home—as a person, she is an indispensable asset and even takes part in the action.
I like that idea! Although she's also an inversion of the butler Poole in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, who can't even break down the door to get at Hyde without the approval of Jekyll's lawyer, Mr. Utterson. I think she's an inversion of the British literary servant, who doesn't really have a life outside of his or her position, unless we're talking about someone like Lord Peter Wimsey's Bunter. I also wanted to give Mrs. Hudson herself a little bit of life--there's a moment, just a moment in the narrative, where Mary learns about her backstory. I wanted to make sure that the Mrs. Pooles and Mrs. Hudsons of the world were not just part of the furniture, and that what they contributed was recognized. Without Mrs. Poole, there really wouldn't be an Athena Club. To Mary, she represents everything normal and sane, everything that is home. Maintaining that home is just as important as going out and solving murders.
I loved the device where the characters participate in the telling of their own stories. There are many reasons why this is wonderful, but I’d love to hear your thoughts about it.
I knew this was going to be a controversial choice. I knew some people would like it and others wouldn't. But I tried to write the novel in a more conventional way, and it just didn't work. The whole point is that the female monsters who remain silent or are silenced in other narratives get to tell their own stories. So I couldn't have a single authoritative narrative voice--my narrative voice (Catherine's) had to be undercut by other voices, by disagreement and response. Sometimes Catherine herself is irritated by those interruptions, but it's the way you get irritated when you're with family and you try to tell a story, but someone else was there and interrupts to correct you, and then another person interrupts that . . . The five main characters become like sisters, and they treat each other the ways sisters would. Also, the original stories and novels that inspired me don't just feature monsters--they are also formally monstrous. None of them have a central omniscient authorial voice of the sort that implies our world is knowable and understandable. Some of them, like Dracula, are made of up fragments (diary entries, newspaper clippings, etc.). Others, like Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, are told from multiple perspectives, any of which may be unreliable. Gothic fiction has generally functioned as the dark shadow of the realistic novel, bringing its orderliness and comprehensiveness into question. The gothic says, you can't know the world, not the way you think you do. Formal experimentation is part of that. So I had to do it too. Plus it was fun! I liked to hear my characters' voices, even when they were being contrary or annoying.
This is a book that has something to say about women, but also about the supernatural literature that has shaped so much contemporary books and media. It’s impossible to imagine a media landscape without the influences of Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, etc. Can you talk a bit about the ideas you wanted to explore by merging and engaging with these texts?
What is a monster? That's one of the central animating ideas of the book. Mary Shelley was asking that question in Frankenstein, so I'm really just following in her very large footsteps. The idea of the monstrous changed around the end of the nineteenth century. Medieval monsters had been seen as signs of God's wrath or omnipotence, depending on how they were interpreted. But by the end of the Victorian era, the term was applied to people born with congenital abnormalities: there was a medicalization of the term. There was also a tremendous interest, at that time, in freak shows and circus sideshows, where people with various genetic conditions, such as hypertrichosis (an unusual amount of hair on the body), were seen as atavisms: evolutionary throwbacks. If you look at turn of the century texts like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Dracula, they are all engaged with the Darwinian thinking of the day. Frankenstein presents us with an older, pre-Darwinian idea of the monster. The Sherlock Holmes stories tap into the Victorian discomfort with difference in another other direction. Holmes is the most rational, and therefore most highly evolved, man-- but he is also a genius, and the genius was considered close to the madman. The famous criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who claimed that he could identify criminals by their ape-like physiology, wrote both about criminals and geniuses. Nowadays we tend to use the term "monster" either for purely fantastical creatures or for human beings who commit monstrous acts, such as serial killers. We also have friendly monsters: think of Cookie Monster. Our ideas of what makes a monster have changed a great deal over time. Hopefully, my book deals at least a little bit with that. And then there are ancillary issues: What does it mean to be a "mad" scientist? What sorts of responsibilities do scientists have toward their creations? What is ethical and unethical in scientific research? These were all issues debated in the late nineteenth century, so they came into the book almost by default.
I understand there is to be a sequel. Any details you’d care to share?
Yes, it's coming out next summer! In the sequel, Mary, Diana, Catherine, Beatrice, and Justine travel to the Austro-Hungarian Empire to solve a case and confront the Société des Alchemistes. That also required a lot of research--I had to go to Vienna and Budapest, and to make sure I was being really accurate, I had to eat a variety of cakes and other pastries. I think it's important to be able to describe an Eszterházy Torte with accuracy. I wouldn't want a reader complaining that I had gotten my cakes wrong . . . In Austria-Hungary, my characters meet old friends and make new ones. They also find new enemies to fight. It's a longer, more complicated book, and I don't know what people will think of it--but I had a lot of fun mentally traveling through late nineteenth-century Europe with the Athena Club.
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia (2014). Her work has been translated into nine languages, including French, Japanese, and Turkish. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her prose-poem "Octavia is Lost in the Hall of Masks" (2003) won the Rhysling Award and her short story "Singing of Mount Abora" (2007) won the World Fantasy Award.
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