She makes a good wage and lives with her lover, Alfred Briehof, until she is abruptly swept from her position by authorities and held in isolation in a cottage on North Brother Island in the East River, site of a tubercular hospital. An Irish immigrant and gifted cook, Mary has found employment with notable New York families. In a clash between science and civil rights, the protection of citizens' health trumps legalities when Mary Mallon is identified as a carrier of typhoid fever. If (('gtm=off') const isAppRedirect = ('appRedirect') Ĭonst isAndroid = /Android/i.test(erAgent) Ĭonst isIphone = /iPhone|iPad|iPod/i.test(erAgent) In the imagination of Mary Beth Keane, Mary Mallon becomes a fiercely compelling, dramatic, vexing, sympathetic, uncompromising, and unforgettable heroine. She defied the edict.īringing early-twentieth-century New York alive-the neighborhoods, the bars, the park carved out of upper Manhattan, the boat traffic, the mansions and sweatshops and emerging skyscrapers-Fever is an ambitious retelling of a forgotten life. Yet for Mary-proud of her former status and passionate about cooking-the alternatives were abhorrent. The Department of Health sent Mallon to North Brother Island, where she was kept in isolation from 1907 to 1910, then released under the condition that she never work as a cook again.
With this seemingly preposterous theory, he made Mallon a hunted woman. Then one determined “medical engineer” noticed that she left a trail of disease wherever she cooked, and identified her as an “asymptomatic carrier” of Typhoid Fever. Sought after by New York aristocracy, and with an independence rare for a woman of the time, she seemed to have achieved the life she’d aimed for when she arrived in Castle Garden.
Canny and enterprising, she worked her way to the kitchen, and discovered in herself the true talent of a chef. Brave, headstrong, and dreaming of being a cook, she fought to climb up from the lowest rung of the domestic-service ladder. On the eve of the twentieth century, Mary Mallon emigrated from Ireland at age fifteen to make her way in New York City.
Mary Beth Keane has written a spectacularly bold and intriguing novel about the woman known as “Typhoid Mary,” the first person in America identified as a healthy carrier of Typhoid Fever. ⚠️ This book will unfortunately be removed from the service on the 14th of May.įrom the bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes, a novel about the woman known as “Typhoid Mary,” who becomes, “in Keane’s assured hands…a sympathetic, complex, and even inspiring character” (O, The Oprah Magazine).
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