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Michelle Stacey. The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery. New York: Putnam, 2002. 336 pp. Ill. $U.S. 23.95; $Can. 34.99 (1-58542-135-9).
My mother was born in a brownstone on Gates Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, down the street from the house in which Mollie Fancher (the celebrated "fasting girl") had died just a few years earlier. But the story of Miss Fancher, who lived in that house for fifty years without leaving-and for much of that time, it was alleged, without eating-belongs to an entirely different era. Drawing heavily on contemporary newspapers and on Abram Dailey's 1894 biography of Mollie Fancher, Michelle Stacey's lively account of Mollie's bedridden life conveys the social and cultural atmosphere of Gilded Age New York. Even her narrative idiom is that of the nineteenth-century sources, which she has examined thoroughly.
Following a streetcar accident in 1865, eighteen-year-old Mollie-a previously unremarkable young woman-took to her bed with a variety of complaints that could be described as neurological, hysterical, anorectic, psychogenic, or "all of the above." She entered a nine-year "trance"...