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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
The full title of this work, Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer, reflect a bit of wacky genius at work here. Someone named Alasdair Gray has found a memoir supposedly of a 19th-century public health officer in Glasgow. The truth of the memoir is suspect, nevertheless Gray manages to change it and then lose it. And that's just the backdrop. Inside the memoir is the story of McCandless, an acquaintance named Godwyn Bysshe Baxter who takes a suicide victim, gives her the brain of her unborn child to create a promiscuous and brutal girlfriend. The book, which won the 1992 Guardian Fiction Prize, takes off from there. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Winner of the 1992 Whitbread Prize, Scottish writer Gray's ( Something Leather ) black comedy uses a science-fiction-like premise to satirize Victorian morals. Ostensibly the memoirs of late-19th-century Glasgow physician Archibald McCandless, the narrative follows the bizarre life of oversexed, volatile Bella Baxter, an emancipated woman and a female Frankenstein. Bella is not her real name; as Victorian Blessington, she drowned herself to escape her abusive husband, but a surgeon removed the brain from the fetus she was carrying and placed it in her skull, resucitating her. The revived Bella has the mental age of a child. Engaged to marry McCandless, she chloroforms him and runs off with a shady lawyer who takes her on a whirlwind adventure, hopping from Alexandria to Odessa to a Parisian brothel. As her brain matures, Bella develops a social conscience, but her rescheduled nuptials to Archie are cut short when she is recognized as Victoria by her lawful husband, Gen. Sir Aubrey Blessington. In an epilogue dated 1914, cranky idealist Victoria McCandless, M.D., a suffragette, Fabian socialist, pacifist and advocate of birthing stools, pokes holes in her late husband Archie's narrative. Illustrated with Gray's suitably macabre drawings, this work of inspired lunacy effectively skewers class snobbery, British imperialism, prudishness and the tenets of received wisdom. Author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
The full title of this work, Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer, reflect a bit of wacky genius at work here. Someone named Alasdair Gray has found a memoir supposedly of a 19th-century public health officer in Glasgow. The truth of the memoir is suspect, nevertheless Gray manages to change it and then lose it. And that's just the backdrop. Inside the memoir is the story of McCandless, an acquaintance named Godwyn Bysshe Baxter who takes a suicide victim, gives her the brain of her unborn child to create a promiscuous and brutal girlfriend. The book, which won the 1992 Guardian Fiction Prize, takes off from there. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Winner of the 1992 Whitbread Prize, Scottish writer Gray's ( Something Leather ) black comedy uses a science-fiction-like premise to satirize Victorian morals. Ostensibly the memoirs of late-19th-century Glasgow physician Archibald McCandless, the narrative follows the bizarre life of oversexed, volatile Bella Baxter, an emancipated woman and a female Frankenstein. Bella is not her real name; as Victorian Blessington, she drowned herself to escape her abusive husband, but a surgeon removed the brain from the fetus she was carrying and placed it in her skull, resucitating her. The revived Bella has the mental age of a child. Engaged to marry McCandless, she chloroforms him and runs off with a shady lawyer who takes her on a whirlwind adventure, hopping from Alexandria to Odessa to a Parisian brothel. As her brain matures, Bella develops a social conscience, but her rescheduled nuptials to Archie are cut short when she is recognized as Victoria by her lawful husband, Gen. Sir Aubrey Blessington. In an epilogue dated 1914, cranky idealist Victoria McCandless, M.D., a suffragette, Fabian socialist, pacifist and advocate of birthing stools, pokes holes in her late husband Archie's narrative. Illustrated with Gray's suitably macabre drawings, this work of inspired lunacy effectively skewers class snobbery, British imperialism, prudishness and the tenets of received wisdom. Author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
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Inside This Book
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs):
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bitter wisdom, green fairy Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Sir Aubrey, Sir Colin, Lady Blessington, Duncan Wedderburn, Park Circus, General Blessington, Bella Baxter, Sir Cohn, Harry Astley, Bell Baxter, Godwin Baxter, Dolly Perkins, Miss Baxter, Porchester Terrace, The Beast, Humane Society, Royal Infirmary, Seymour Grimes, Victoria Blessington, Queen Victoria, Church of England, Duncan Doubleyou, United States, Victoria Hattersley, San Francisco New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
bitter wisdom, green fairy Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Sir Aubrey, Sir Colin, Lady Blessington, Duncan Wedderburn, Park Circus, General Blessington, Bella Baxter, Sir Cohn, Harry Astley, Bell Baxter, Godwin Baxter, Dolly Perkins, Miss Baxter, Porchester Terrace, The Beast, Humane Society, Royal Infirmary, Seymour Grimes, Victoria Blessington, Queen Victoria, Church of England, Duncan Doubleyou, United States, Victoria Hattersley, San Francisco New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
24
books
cite this book:
See all 24 books citing this book
- Alasdair Gray: The Fiction of Communion (Scroll 4) (Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature) by Gavin Miller on 9 pages
- Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film (Postmodern Studies 35) by Christian Gutleben on 9 pages
- The Postmodern (The New Critical Idiom) by Simon Malpas on 7 pages
- Beyond Postmodernism: Reassessments in Literature, Theory, and Culture by Klaus Stierstorfer on 6 pages
- The Postmodern (New Critical Idiom) by Simon Malpas on 6 pages
See all 24 books citing this book
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