Soper, takes note of this and traces Mary’s movements until he becomes convinced that she is the source of the contagion-a healthy carrier of Typhoid fever.Īfter Soper confronts Mary and she refuses to go with him for testing, he has her arrested and placed into quarantine. But many families she cooks for fall ill with typhoid fever. But who was Typhoid Mary? In her rich, sympathetic, provocative historical novel Fever, Mary Beth Keane explores the woman behind the infamy.Īt the end of the nineteenth century, Mary Mallon emigrates from Ireland to New York City and works hard to climb the domestic service ladder until she becomes a sought-after cook for wealthy New York families. It is a name so well-known it has become an idiom in American English, referring to a transmitter not just of disease, but of anything harmful or catastrophic. In the imagination of Mary Beth Keane, Mary Mallon becomes a fiercely compelling, dramatic, vexing, sympathetic, uncompromising, and unforgettable heroine.Typhoid Mary. She defied the edict.īringing early-twentieth-century New York alive-the neighborhoods, the bars, the park carved out of upper Manhattan, the boat traffic, the mansions and sweatshops and emerging skyscrapers-Fever is an ambitious retelling of a forgotten life.
Yet for Mary-proud of her former status and passionate about cooking-the alternatives were abhorrent. The Department of Health sent Mallon to North Brother Island, where she was kept in isolation from 1907 to 1910, then released under the condition that she never work as a cook again. With this seemingly preposterous theory, he made Mallon a hunted woman.
Then one determined "medical engineer" noticed that she left a trail of disease wherever she cooked, and identified her as an "asymptomatic carrier" of Typhoid Fever. Sought after by New York aristocracy, and with an independence rare for a woman of the time, she seemed to have achieved the life she'd aimed for when she arrived in Castle Garden. Canny and enterprising, she worked her way to the kitchen, and discovered in herself the true talent of a chef. Brave, headstrong, and dreaming of being a cook, she fought to climb up from the lowest rung of the domestic-service ladder. On the eve of the twentieth century, Mary Mallon emigrated from Ireland at age fifteen to make her way in New York City. Mary Beth Keane, named one of the 5 Under 35 by the National Book Foundation, has written a spectacularly bold and intriguing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first person in America identified as a healthy carrier of Typhoid Fever.
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