In chapter nine of The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, Diana Hyde, daughter of the infamous Edward Hyde, asks the following question of Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, and her half-sister Mary Jekyll: “Is anyone not a member of this society?” The question, if posed playfully, could also characterize the novel itself—which manages to incorporate an impressively large number of nineteenth-century characters into a single cohesive plot.
Theodora Goss’s latest work, released in June 2017, paints a vivid and historically-rich portrait of London in the 1890s. In addition to constantly calling her reader’s attention to the era’s real political issues, like women’s suffrage, and defining events, like the Whitechapel Murders, Goss weaves together a rigorously detailed story that imagines scientific links and personal relationships between numerous characters from nineteenth-century works.
