Poor Things

Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer (1992) is a novel written by Scottish author Alasdair Gray. The novel explores issues of Scottish national identity in the 19th and 20th centuries, Victorian gender roles, and scientific progress. Poor Things is a postmodernist pastiche of Gothic literature that functions in part as a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). It is told from multiple perspectives, and its narrators each approach the story with their own biases. The novel won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award. In 2023, it was adapted into a film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.

This guide uses the 2014 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc e-book edition of the novel. 

Content Warning: This guide includes discussions of suicide, pedophilia, incest, colonial violence, and non-consensual medical experimentation.

Plot Summary

Poor Things opens with an introduction by Alasdair Gray, a fictionalized version of the novel’s author. He claims that a Glasgow historian recently found a manuscript of a book by a doctor named Archibald McCandless, along with a letter by Victoria McCandless, his wife. The book tells an extraordinary story about medical experimentation; the letter claims that the book is fiction. Gray, who insists that the book is non-fiction, takes on the role of editor. He claims that he has made no changes to the text of the manuscript besides adding footnotes for context.

Archibald McCandless recounts the story of his early life as the son of a poor Scottish woman in the mid-19th century. He attends medical school, where he befriends a strange-looking genius named Godwin Baxter. Godwin invites McCandless to his home, where he shows him two rabbits that have been cut apart and recombined. McCandless is desperate to know Godwin’s secrets, but the two quarrel, and Godwin asks McCandless to leave.

Several months later, Godwin and McCandless meet again, and Godwin again invites McCandless to his home. There, McCandless meets a childlike woman named Bella Baxter and immediately falls in love with her. Godwin tells McCandless that Bella was a heavily pregnant woman who died by suicide. Godwin brought her body to his home and transplanted the brain of the fetus into her head before reanimating her. Bella’s brain is developing rapidly. McCandless suspects that Godwin was constructed or reanimated in a similar Frankenstein-like way. Godwin has told Bella that she lost her memory after her parents, his distant cousins, died in an accident in Argentina. He takes her on a world tour that lasts 15 months.

McCandless meets Bella and Godwin again upon their return. Bella now behaves more like a 12-year-old with very odd speech patterns. She pulls McCandless into shrubbery, where they have an ambiguously sexual encounter. To McCandless’s horror, she tells him that she has had many similar encounters with men and women on her travels. He asks Bella to marry him, and she accepts. When they tell Godwin about their plan, he lets out a preternaturally loud scream. He is in love with Bella and is devastated that she does not reciprocate his feelings, but ultimately accepts her betrothal to McCandless.

A few days later, Bella runs away with Duncan Wedderburn, an unscrupulous lawyer. Godwin and McCandless learn about Bella’s adventures through letters they receive from Duncan and Bella. Duncan’s letter describes a journey across Europe, throughout which Bella wanted to have sex so frequently that Duncan was unable to get any sleep. After many days of this, he experienced a breakdown and then spent most of his time in a cabin on a Mediterranean cruise recovering his strength. Unable to understand Bella, he decided she and Godwin must have been working for Satan. Upon arriving in Paris, he converted to Catholicism, abandoned Bella, and returned to Glasgow. He has since been committed to an asylum.

Bella’s letter indicates that her mental development has increased significantly during her months-long voyage. She confirms some parts of Duncan’s narrative: She did keep him awake, and he did have a breakdown. He also gambled away all their money. While on the Mediterranean cruise, Bella became acquainted with two men, the American Dr. Hooker and the English Mr. Astley. Noting her naïve approach to life, the men took her to Alexandria, where she witnessed poverty and cruelty for the first time. Astley tried to persuade her of his Malthusian, imperialist perspective, but Bella became a socialist instead. In Paris, she worked in a brothel to earn her passage home but lost all the money and had to contact one of Godwin’s friends, who helped her return to Glasgow.

Bella reunites with Godwin and McCandless. At the wedding of Bella and McCandless, several men arrive and object, claiming that Bella is really called Victoria and that she is already married to a man named General Blessington. It turns out that Victoria was the woman who died by suicide. Everyone returns to Godwin’s house, where Blessington tries to force Bella to return to England with him. She refuses. There is a scuffle, but eventually the men leave. Shortly thereafter, Blessington dies; Bella and McCandless marry. Godwin’s health declines because of his unusual physiology and he dies.

McCandless’s narrative ends here, but it is followed by Victoria’s letter. She explains that her husband’s book is a work of fiction. She describes her childhood in Manchester with an abusive father and an education that sought only to turn her into the perfect wife. When she married Blessington, he was cold and distant, making her feel sexually frustrated and alone. She met Godwin Baxter, a talented surgeon (though not a Frankenstein-like creation) and begged him to perform a clitoridectomy to reduce her unfulfilled sexual desires. Godwin refused but told her that if she needed to leave her husband, he would shelter her. She fled to Godwin’s house and soon fell in love with him, though he did not reciprocate. She later met McCandless, whom neither she nor Godwin particularly liked. 

Godwin did take Victoria on a world tour, and she did later run away with Wedderburn before returning and marrying McCandless. She agreed to his proposal because while she could not marry Godwin, she understood that having a husband would make her life and career easier, and she did not want to be lonely. Victoria became an accomplished doctor and had three sons with McCandless. In contrast to her success, McCandless was always at a loose end. She believes he invented the narrative to console himself. In a final footnote, Gray explains that in addition to her medical career, Victoria was a devoted socialist activist who wrote controversial medical pamphlets and lived until 1946.