A short life of the author
Marianne Wiggins (8 November 1947 – 9 April 2023) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose ambitious, language-rich fiction established her as one of the most stylistically adventurous American novelists of her generation. Her novels range from a feminist retelling of Lord of the Flies set in colonial Burma (John Dollar, 1989) to a panoramic novel about the atomic age (Evidence of Things Unseen, 2003) to an experimental meditation on photography and identity (The Shadow Catcher, 2007). Her public profile was shaped partly by her marriage to Salman Rushdie and their shared experience of the fatwa, but her work stands independent of that biography.
Life
Wiggins was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She published her first novel, Babe (1975), in her late twenties. Her early short fiction — collected in Herself in Love (1987) and Bet They’ll Miss Us When We’re Gone (1991) — announced a distinctive voice: lyrical, formally experimental, and willing to take risks that more cautious writers avoided.
In 1988, she married Salman Rushdie. When the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa against Rushdie in February 1989 — calling for his death over The Satanic Verses — Wiggins went into hiding with him. She lived under assumed names with armed protection for over a year before the marriage collapsed. The experience marked her profoundly: she rarely discussed it publicly, but the themes of displacement, threat, and the fragility of ordinary life run through her subsequent fiction.
She taught at the University of Southern California and other institutions. She suffered a debilitating stroke in 2016 that effectively ended her career, though her final novel, Properties of Thirst, was published in 2022.
John Dollar (1989)
Wiggins’s most widely read novel is a feminist reimagining of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, set in colonial Burma in the 1920s. A group of English girls are stranded on an island after an earthquake destroys their colonial outpost. The novel tracks their descent into violence and their complex, shifting power dynamics — but unlike Golding, Wiggins is also interested in the colonial world that produced these girls and in the specific ways that gender shapes their behaviour in extremity.
The novel is written in dense, sensuous prose that draws on both the lushness of the tropical setting and the violence of the story. It was widely reviewed and compared to Golding, Conrad, and Paul Bowles.
Evidence of Things Unseen (2003)
A National Book Award finalist, this novel follows a Tennessee couple — Fos, a World War I veteran fascinated by luminescence and physics, and Opal, a woman of few words and deep feeling — from the 1920s through the Manhattan Project and the dawn of the atomic age. The novel uses the physics of light (phosphorescence, X-rays, radioactivity) as both literal subject and governing metaphor.
It is Wiggins’s most ambitious novel — a multigenerational American epic in the tradition of Angle of Repose and Underworld — and it was praised for its lyrical prose and intellectual ambition, though some critics found it overwritten.
The Shadow Catcher (2007)
An inventive novel structured around the life of Edward S. Curtis, the photographer who spent decades documenting Native American peoples. Wiggins blends a fictional narrative of Curtis’s wife, Clara, with a first-person contemporary narrative in which a character named “Marianne Wiggins” receives a mysterious photograph. The novel interrogates questions of representation, appropriation, and whose stories get told.
Critical Standing
Wiggins is admired by writers and literary readers but has never achieved wide commercial success. Her prose is demanding — dense, metaphor-rich, sometimes baroque — and her novels require patience. She is one of those American novelists (like Joy Williams or Marilynne Robinson before Gilead) whose reputation rests on the esteem of fellow writers rather than on sales.
Collecting Wiggins
John Dollar (1989, Harper & Row) in first edition brings $15–$40. Evidence of Things Unseen (2003, Simon & Schuster) brings $10–$25. Signed copies are uncommon; Wiggins was not a frequent public presence.