Poor Things

Content Warning: This section discusses suicide, pedophilia, and non-consensual medical experimentation.

Alasdair Gray is the author of Poor Things, but he presents himself as a fictionalized editor of the text. The purported author of the text, a doctor named Archibald McCandless, claims that in 1881, a “surgical genius used human remains to create a twenty-five-year-old woman” (6). A Glaswegian historian named Michael Donnelly found McCandless’s account of this astonishing feat in a sealed package in the 1970s. The package belonged to the estate of a woman named Dr. Victoria McCandless, and it was addressed to her eldest surviving grandchild. Inside the package was a manuscript entitled “EPISODES FROM THE EARLY LIFE of a SCOTTISH PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICER / Archibald McCandless M.D.” (9). In addition to the book, the package contained a letter from Victoria, McCandless’s wife, telling her descendants that McCandless’s book is fiction.

In 1990, Donnelly lent Alasdair Gray the book in the hope that Gray, a writer, would publish it as a work of fiction. Gray agreed on the condition that he be given complete control over the editing process. He assured Donnelly that he would not alter any of McCandless’s original text. He has, however, changed the chapter titles and named the entire manuscript Poor Things.