Shortly after the 19th century turned into the 20th, a medical sleuth named George Soper, whom we would today call an epidemiologist, identified a young Irish immigrant cook in New York City as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen that causes typhoid fever. Her name was Mary Mallon, and we make her acquaintance in this book about Typhoid Mary, as the world came to know her.
An illuminating historical novel
Mary Mallon, George Soper, and Mary’s on-again, off-again live-in boyfriend, Alfred Briehof are the principal characters in Mary Beth Keane’s illuminating historical novel that traces Typhoid Mary’s life from her arrival in the US in 1883 at the age of 14 until her death in 1938. Fever is at once a love story, medical history, a perceptive study of self-deception, and a period piece that brings to life the teeming microcosm of New York City in the early years of the last century.
Mary is a spirited, self-assured young woman who is at once bright and pretty—and, from an early age, a talented cook. As Keane pictures her, she might have become a celebrity chef had she come of age a century later. She is hopelessly in love with Alfred, a handsome young German immigrant who is both an alcoholic and a scoundrel. But Mary clings to Alfred even through his binges, and she loves her life as a cook to some of New York’s “finest families” until George Soper comes calling.
Fever: A Novel of Typhoid Mary by Mary Beth Keane (2013) 320 pages ★★★★☆
A fascinating case study in cultural change
Keane is at her best plumbing the depths of Mary’s increasingly complex thoughts about typhoid fever. “Disease and death didn’t follow her any more than they followed anyone else,” Mary believed. “People had been dying her whole life . . . Had they had fevers? She supposed they had . . . People became sick, they died. She never heard the word Typhoid until she came to America.” The evolution of Mary’s thinking through the years, as Keane describes it, is a fascinating case study in change—in this case, to adopt the Germ Theory of Disease. Read this book about Typhoid Mary, and you may come away from it with a newfound appreciation of just how difficult it is for many people to accept new ideas.
About the author
Mary Beth Keane is the author of four novels published from 2009 to 2023. She has won widespread praise for her writing, and a number of awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. Keane was born of Irish parents in the Bronx, New York, in 1977. She graduated from Barnard College with a BA in English Literature and, later, the University of Virginia, where she earned her MFA in Fiction. She lives near New York City with her husband and their two sons.
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