Poor Things

Poor Things is both the title imposed on Archibald McCandless’s manuscript and the name under which its conflicting accounts of Bella Baxter are presented to readers. Its decisive feature is not simply the extraordinary story it contains, but the struggle over whether that story should be read as history or fiction: an editor claims documentary proof for McCandless’s account, while the epilogue attributed to Bella Baxter / Victoria McCandless calls it a deliberate lie. The book makes that disagreement part of its subject, so that authorship, evidence, and the power to define another person remain unsettled even after the narrative ends.

Title and Editorial Construction

The editor says that Michael Donnelly lent the manuscript in the autumn of 1990, describing it as a lost masterpiece that deserved publication. The editor agreed to arrange publication only on the condition of having complete control over the editing, and promised not to alter McCandless’s actual text. The resulting volume is described as nearly a facsimile of the original, with the Strang etchings and other illustrative devices reproduced photographically. Yet the editor also acknowledges making conspicuous interventions: lengthy chapter headings were replaced with shorter titles, and the entire work was renamed Poor Things.

The new title is defended as a phrase that recurs throughout the story. According to the editor, every character except Mrs. Dinwiddie and two of General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington’s parasites is called poor or calls themselves poor at some point. That recurrence lets the title carry several possible weights at once: poverty, vulnerability, self-pity, and the habit of viewing people as objects of pity. Its broadness suits a book whose characters and narrators repeatedly dispute who is truly disadvantaged and whose account deserves belief.

The position of the letter attributed to Bella Baxter / Victoria McCandless was another editorial decision. Donnelly preferred it as an introduction, but the editor placed it after McCandless’s main narrative as an epilogue. The stated reason is that reading it first would prejudice readers against the story; read afterward, it can be taken as the letter of a disturbed woman trying to conceal the truth about her beginnings. The placement does not settle the dispute. Instead, it lets the main narrative establish its version before the letter challenges it, making the order of reading part of the book’s machinery of belief.

A Story Framed as Evidence

The editor explicitly disagrees with Donnelly about what kind of book Poor Things is. Donnelly sees black comedy interwoven with real experiences and historical facts, comparable in method to Scott’s Old Mortality and Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The editor instead regards it as a loving portrait of an astonishing, good, eccentric man, recorded by a friend with a strong memory for dialogue, and compares that method to Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. In this account, McCandless’s narration also becomes a host for other people’s letters, allowing the subject to appear from different angles and eventually revealing a wider society.

The dispute becomes a contest over professional authority. The editor says that, after Donnelly insisted he recognized fiction because he had written history, he became a historian in order to answer him. He describes six months of research in archives at Glasgow University, the Mitchell Library’s Old Glasgow Room, the Scottish National Library, Register House in Edinburgh, Somerset House in London, and the National Newspaper Archive of the British Library at Colindale. He presents the accumulated material as proof that the McCandless story is a tissue of facts, and directs readers who want an unencumbered story to the main narrative while inviting professional doubters to consult the table of events.

That claim to documentary support is deliberately unstable beside the epilogue’s counter-claim. The writer there argues that McCandless borrowed episodes and phrases from Victorian and later works of fiction, and interprets his invented equalities among himself, Godwin Baxter, and Bella as expressions of envy. She further alleges that he knowingly wrote a cunning lie. Because the editor has already framed this letter as potentially self-protective and unreliable, neither account arrives with uncontested authority. Poor Things turns its supporting apparatus—letters, research, tables, and editorial explanations—into part of the evidence that readers must assess.

Strange Bodies and the Meaning of Pity

One of McCandless’s early encounters with Godwin Baxter’s work shows how the book’s extraordinary material is joined to its ethical questions. McCandless examines Mopsy and Flopsy, rabbits whose coats divide into sharply contrasting black-and-white halves, with the pattern reversed between them. Their bodies also differ in their sexual characteristics and in subtle ridges beneath the fur. McCandless concludes that they are works of art rather than natural freaks, and handles one with sudden care. Baxter explains that the rabbits had been ordinary and happy before he put them to sleep; they woke altered, no longer interested in procreation, and he intends to restore them the next day.

The scene complicates admiration for scientific power with pity for the living creatures on which it acts. Baxter calls his intervention shabby rather than wonderful, and remarks that he could use his abilities to replace rich people’s diseased hearts with healthy hearts taken from poorer people, but declines to profit from such a temptation. The rabbits are thus not just a display of technical ingenuity: their altered bodies make the costs and responsibilities of intervention visible before the narrative turns to Bella’s creation.

Baxter explains that the woman whose body he found had drowned herself, and that he chose not to restore her former consciousness because he understood her death as a deliberate escape from a life she had rejected. He says that suicide in this Christian nation is treated as lunacy or crime, and describes keeping the body alive only at a cellular level. He places this decision against poverty, social prejudice, and the medical treatment of infants born with conditions that leave them unable to survive. He also describes discarded bodies and brains as part of a social midden heap, and says that his long-planned experiment joined such remains in a new life: Bella. The account binds an astonishing act of creation to failures of care and to the question of who is entitled to decide what a life should become.

The Manuscript’s Counterstory and Afterlife

The epilogue contests McCandless’s version at its foundations. Its writer rejects the account of Bella’s origins and argues that McCandless made himself equal to Bella and Godwin Baxter by inventing a shared deprivation: he gave Baxter a manufactured childhood and represented Bella as mentally a baby when McCandless first met her. She claims that this invention allowed him to depict Bella as loving him at first sight and Baxter as envious of him. She also insists that McCandless was not insane, but knew that his fiction was outwitting the truth. These allegations do not resolve the novel’s competing histories; they make the manuscript’s account of intimacy and identity itself an object of suspicion.

The epilogue offers a specific test of McCandless’s reliability in its objection to an anatomical description of a gunshot wound. The writer says that the passage names the wrong part of the body and counters it with a different anatomical account of what happened. She presents the mistake as something McCandless could not have made if he had remembered his medical training, and uses it to argue that he knew the story was false. The detail turns a dispute about a whole life into a dispute over the precision of a single description: apparent expertise can authenticate an account, but technical language can also expose its fabrication.

A final editorial claim adds another layer to the book’s uncertain history. The editor says that several other books discussed in the notes show McCandless had no creative imagination or ear for dialogue, and concludes that he must have copied Poor Things from highly detailed diary notes. The manuscript burned by his wife, the editor says, would have proved this. That conclusion sits uneasily beside the epilogue’s suggestion that McCandless deliberately invented his narrative. The surviving volume therefore offers no simple verdict on whether its central story is documentary, fictional, or assembled from both. Its form preserves the conflict: the reader receives McCandless’s account, a letter that disputes it, and editorial claims that alternately certify and destabilize them.