![]() In 1907, after one of these families hired medical investigator George Soper to identify the source of this pestilence, he confronted Mary and had her quarantined against her will on North Brother Island in the East River. Perfectly capturing the harsh realities of life as an immigrant in early 1900s America, Keane paints a sympathetic picture of Mary, an accomplished cook whose popularity amongst the monied families of New York led to unexplained sickness and sometimes death whenever she entered their kitchens. In Fever, her second novel and the follow-up to The Walking People (2009), Mary Beth Keane eloquently blends fiction and fact to fill in the largely undocumented intimate details of Mary’s life and her emotional response to such tragedy. ![]() Yet while we may be aware that, as the first identified asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, Mary was held responsible for a number of deaths and incarcerated as a result, few of us know anything of her internal life and her response to being labelled an unwitting harbinger of disease and death. ‘The name Mary Mallon once struck fear into the hearts of the residents of New York and, although a century and more has elapsed since her notoriety was at its height, the Tyrone-born immigrant is still well known to us today as ‘Typhoid Mary’. My review of Fever by Mary Beth Keane is available on writing.ie. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |