Theodora Goss’s THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF THE ATHENA CLUB Victorian-era fantasy series brings together a valiant group of women who are the results of men’s scientific experiments: men like Dr. Moreau, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and others. In this series, the women characters ― several of whom perished in the original nineteenth-century stories ― not only survive but thrive. Calling themselves the Athena Club, Mary Jekyll, her sister Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, and Justine Frankenstein have banded together to protect each other and others from the men who lose their moral compass in the name of scientific exploration and experimentation.

In European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, the worthy but long-winded sequel to The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, Mary receives a letter from Lucinda Van Helsing in Austria, begging for the Athena Club’s help: her professor father has been experimenting on her and she is changing in ways that terrify her. When Mary soon after receives a telegram telling her that Lucinda is missing, she, Diana and Justine head for Vienna on the Orient Express train to search for Lucinda, while Beatrice and Catherine (temporarily) stay behind in London to do some investigation there. The courageous women meet new friends and allies … but also some fearsome new enemies.

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman is a fantasy not only set in the Victorian era but informed by the literature of the time, though with a distinctly modern, feminist take on the role of women. It has a great ensemble cast of characters, supplemented by some intriguing new ones (the addition of the Van Helsing family is a broad hint at the Victorian novel from which Goss is taking inspiration for this novel).

But European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman is extremely long (over 700 pages, and I sensed every one of them) and overly attentive to mundane details. I mean, it’s possible to be inspired a bit TOO much by Victorian novels. Jana (in her review) comments on the glacial pacing, and I completely agree. While I still enjoyed the diverse and unusual characters, their humorous banter and monstrous adventures, the length and pacing issues were too much of barrier for me to be fully engaged by this novel.

It’s a longstanding literary irony that the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ended up being referred to by the name of his creator: Frankenstein is, of course, the mad doctor, not the lumbering result of his attempts to play god. Some of this is due to the fact that Shelley never names Victor Frankenstein’s creature, which is, upon reflection, a striking lacuna. The person—creature, man, human—at the center of one most foundational works of science fiction has no name at all. Many early Gothic fictions have this sort of odd absence, whether centrally or at their edges; whether due to differing cultural expectations among modern readers or the then-newness of the novel form, there are a lot of dropped threads in these early works of the fantastic.


It is into this blank space, and about these ignored characters, that Theodora Goss’s wrote her debut novel, 2017 Nebula Award nominee The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter. That delightful tale introduces us to Mary Jekyll and Diana Hyde, uncomfortable sisters, and daughters of the infamous scientist and his murderous alter-ego. There’s Catherine Moreau—the ostensible author of the novel we’re reading, and also a puma vivisected into a human form by the mad scientist whose name she bears. Shelley’s executed servant Justine Moritz finds new life as Justine Frankenstein, having escaped destruction at the hands of her creator. Rappaccini’s daughter Beatrice, who was raised on poison, cannot help but be poisonous. These women, they are all what they were made to be, but then, so much more.

These five women, all daughters either by biology or deed of monstrous scientists, make up the Athena Club, a union of the cast off and ignored, bound together for mutual aid. That they are called monstrous is just as deep an irony as Frankenstein’s creature being given the sobriquet of Frankenstein. More so, possibly, because the creature they encounter in The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, now named Adam, is well entrenched in the Société des Alchimistes, a secret society of scientists—of which every one of their fathers was a member. The Athena Club is both personal and political, a group of women deeply injured by the unfettered scientific excess of their father/creators. Their lives were experiments, which is both unethical and cruel.


Which is why, at the start of European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, the Athena Club jumps into action almost without thought when they receive an entreaty from Lucinda van Helsing. She claims to be the subject of certain experiments carried out by her father, the famed vampire hunter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Every member of the Athena Club understands the precariousness of being a daughter to such men, who would use their children as experimental fodder. After an initially bungled foray into the sanitarium where Stoker’s madman Renfield was housed, Mary and Justine prepare to travel to the continent to rescue Lucinda and put down the Société des Alchimistes for good.

In addition to the children of Gothic fiction, the members of the Athena Club and their associates include other characters from Victorian pulp fiction, folks like Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. After a sojourn on the Orient Express, Mary, Justine, and a stowaway find themselves in Prague, where the Société des Alchimistes is set to meet, and Lucinda van Helsing is being held. The plot of moves around the European continent, like one would expect, and intersects with characters both famous and infamous, not necessarily in ways one would expect.

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman is a peripatetic sequel to an accomplished beginning, one which deepens the relationships between the established characters. It also folds in new ones, recovered from the blank spaces in Gothic literature—the place where daughters and servants and mothers and children live out their unmentioned lives as best they can. It is a fully realized world of people who were initially unconsidered and unobserved, a rich testament to small lives lived large.