Godwin Baxter is a brilliant scientist and physician who was consumed by his research and never found time to have a family. It also did not help that he was physically quite hideous. The corpse of a beautiful young woman is brought to his laboratory one day; she had committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. Her attire and jewellery suggest that she was quite well to do and astonishingly, she was pregnant.
Using all the knowledge at his disposal, Baxter brings both the young woman and her baby back to life, after a fashion; he operates on the woman and put her baby’s brain in her body. He recruits a Dr. Archibald McCandless, a poor student of his, to document the development of Bella as she grows up from infant, to toddler, to child and eventually adulthood, all while in an adult’s body.
This causes Bella to experience womanhood and societal expectations of women as a child; serious as this may sound, the way it is written is exceedingly funny. Bella, after a whirlwind world tour involving several sexual encounters, goes on to marry McCandless and study to become a nurse, veterinarian and eventually a doctor.
There are several themes here which have all been cleverly enmeshed. This is a tribute, or even a satire of several Victorian classics; Frankenstein of course, some Jekyll and Hyde, a bit of Don Juan, all revisited through a lens of a woman not weighed down by the standard Victorian “propriety”, thereby giving a uniquely feminist perspective to everything.
At once funny and thought-provoking, this book is presented as a recounting of events by Dr. Archibald McCandless, but Bella (a.k.a Dr. Victoria McCandless) has her say too, and presents her own perspective in the latter third of the book. An altogether good read.