Elsie Venner

Elsie Venner is your typical teenage girl. But unlike her classmates at the Apollinean Female Institute, her mother was bitten by a rattlesnake while pregnant. Not a girl, not yet a woman, and also not quite human, Elsie battles the snake within...

Published after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and before Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, this wild tale undresses Puritanism and anticipates psychoanalysis. Oliver Wendell Holmes confronts original sin in this medical case study-cum-romance.

[publishers' note]