Our Hideous Progeny

C.E. McGill

Penguin Random House

Otago Daily Times, August 19th 2023

Recent years have seen a flourishing of books retelling classic tales from the point of view of minor – often female – characters. Now, it seems, with the arrival of novels such as last year’s highly regarded The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, this re-visioning has extended to future generations. In Our Hideous Progeny, C.E. McGill introduces us to Mary Sutherland, the great-niece of Victor Frankenstein, an able scientist in her own right whose talent and ambition are stifled by the same misogynistic 19^th-century attitudes that refused to acknowledge such brilliant women as Ada Lovelace.

It is the 1850s, and Mary and her husband, palaeologist Henry Sutherland have been blackballed from the scientific establishment after Henry’s public criticism of Professor Richard Owen’s claims about Dinosauria, accusing him of “creating entire orders out of mere handfuls of bone”.  He is especially critical of the depictions of the iguanodon as crawling like a lizard and the plesiosaurus with its neck “curving like a snake or the neck of a swan” (Owen’s original publication included a drawing where he indeed juxtaposed the tail and the neck). Financially straitened and with a marriage that has been faltering since the stillbirth of their daughter a year earlier, they are close to breaking point when Mary discovers partially burned notes detailing her great-uncle’s work.  She and her husband immediately set out to recreate Frankenstein’s experiments. But rather than animate a human form, they decide to prove Owen wrong by recreating a miniature plesiosaurus and unveiling it at the Great Exhibition.

The story is told from Mary’s perspective and highlights the hardships and frustrations of being forced to occupy a role in which she must continually subsume herself. Her marriage to Henry is not without affection but has more to do with his acknowledgment of her abilities than any strong attraction, and she is still relegated to illustrating her husband’s manuscripts rather than writing papers in her own right. Her grief at her daughter’s loss is complicated by the ambivalence she felt about her impending motherhood right up until the birth, and her sense that, by being unable to bear a live child, she has failed some essential test of womanhood. Her growing attraction to Henry’s sister Maisie, which parallels her disillusionment with her husband, only adds to her distress.  

In the creation of her plesiosaur – for it is hers, despite her husband and their male colleague’s attempts to minimise her contribution – she finally finds the intersection between ‘masculine’ science and ‘feminine’ generativity. But she is also able to see what the others do not: that the creature is in pain and deserves to be free from both confinement and suffering. And if she is brave enough to save the creature, perhaps she can save herself too.

Our Hideous Progeny is both a commentary on the historical (and not so historical) discrimination against women in science and a tribute to the English-speaking world’s science-fiction novel, itself the work of an extraordinary woman.