Sunday, April 07, 2019

Eight top novels that reexamine literature from the margins

Katharine Duckett hails from East Tennessee, has lived in Turkey and Kazakhstan, and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she majored in minotaurs. Miranda in Milan is her first novel.

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog she tagged eight "compelling literary works that reimagine the experiences of women who were silenced, sidelined, or slandered in their original appearances in the canon." One title on the list:
Mary Reilly, by Valerie Martin

In this narrative that runs parallel to the events of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Mary Reilly is a dutiful servant in the household of the kind and mild Henry Jekyll. She develops an unusually close relationship with the master of the house, and as his behavior becomes more erratic and inexplicable (a development that coincides with the sudden appearance of his unsavory assistant, Edward Hyde), Mary reflects on her own father’s dualistic nature, his transformations driven by drink and his treatment of Mary almost as reprehensible as some of the acts in London that she begins to get wind of, dark crimes that may involve Edward Hyde himself.
Read about another entry on the list.

Mary Reilly is among Charles Palliser's top ten neo-Victorian novels.

--Marshal Zeringue