The Lost Girls by Donna Gowland – Review

The Mary Shelley Investigations series began earlier this year with the publication of the excellent The Missing Wife. I interviewed author Donna Gowland about the book and she described what drove her to create a literary series in which Mary Shelley (Mary Godwin to be precise as the novel is set prior to her marriage to Percy Shelley) solves mysteries by playing amateur detective. Gowland is extremely knowledgeable about Mary Shelley and this expertise ensures that the latest addition to the series, The Lost Girls, is rich in period detail.

The story begins roughly where The Missing Wife left off. Mary and her lover Percy Shelley are back in London and find themselves ostracised from polite society as they are living together in sin. Percy is still married to his estranged wife Harriett. He spends his time in the taverns, drinking and whoring his days away. Mary is determined to find a way out their squalid living conditions. But soon enough, she finds herself embroiled in another deadly mystery. Mary’s stepsister Claire Claremont, who Marys suspects is a rival for Shelley’s affections, claims to have witnessed the violent death of a girl. But when Mary and Percy arrive at the scene of the crime the corpse has vanished. Shortly thereafter, more girls are reported as missing. There are shades of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ in the storyline and Gowland takes Mary to heart of the British medical establishment and the scientific advances that were being made at the time. I was fascinated by one character, Dr James Barry, in particular. These scenes shed light on how Mary may have been inspired to write her greatest work – Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

The Lost Girls works as both a fine period novel and as an intricate Gothic mystery. Gowland has brought Mary Shelley alive in these novels. Now I can’t wait for the third volume in the series.