Poor Things was published by Bloomsbury in 1992 and won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. It was adapted into a film by Yorgos Lanthimos in 2023 (starring Emma Stone, who won an Academy Award for the role). The novel is presented as a recently discovered Victorian manuscript — the memoirs of Archibald McCandless, a Glasgow physician, edited and annotated by Alasdair Gray.
McCandless tells the story of his friend Godwin Baxter — a brilliant, grotesque scientist (named for Mary Shelley’s father and the surname of the monster’s creator) who rescues the body of a drowned pregnant woman from the Clyde and resurrects her by implanting the brain of her unborn child into her adult skull. The result is Bella Baxter: a woman with an adult body but an infant’s uninhibited appetites, who grows rapidly toward intelligence and independence.
The novel is followed by a letter from “Bella” herself (now Victoria McCandless) asserting that McCandless’s entire narrative is a misogynistic fantasy — that she was never resurrected, that Baxter was merely her benefactor, and that the monstrous-creation story is a male fantasy of female origin designed to deny women autonomy. Gray leaves both versions standing, refusing to arbitrate — the novel becomes a study of how men construct narratives about women, and how women resist those narratives.
Collecting Poor Things
First edition (Bloomsbury, London, 1992): Cloth with dust jacket. Illustrated by Gray.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$100
- Signed copies: $200–$500
- Film adaptation (2023) has significantly increased demand