Reviewed by Lory Widmer Hess
When I close a book I’ve been living in, I often feel bereft. It’s as if I’ve been watching a master juggler, who abruptly vanishes. The flying balls drop to earth and sit lifeless. Gravity has taken over, and I have to go back to plodding along the ground, with just a memory of the magic I witnessed.
That memory can be sweet in itself, and there’s always rereading, of course. But there’s also the call to create something to extend the experience, keeping the balls in the air. Any book of substance invariably leaves some unanswered questions. What happened to…? Couldn’t there be more about …? Wouldn’t it make sense if …? And what if a meeting took place between …? While I myself could produce nothing other than the most lumbering kind of fan fiction from these questions, a master juggler can sometimes pick up the trick, and make the balls fly again.
Such a master is Theodora Goss, whose new story collection “Letter from an Imaginary Country” riffs on a number of literary sources, and on the whole process of storytelling as secondary creation. The imaginative world is not less real than the sensory world, only accessed via a different door. And in these stories, the two worlds have a way of bleeding into each other, merging and entwining with results that are sometimes playful, sometimes disquieting, but always mesmerizing to watch.
The first story, “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter,” sets the stage by bringing together the female “monsters” of nineteenth century fiction. Each started as an experiment by a man who gave little thought to what might come of his meddling with the fabric of life, from revivifying dead body parts to genetically engineering a feline. The women are the ones who have to bear the consequences, and it’s a marvellous premise to bring them into relationship with each other as a sisterhood, giving them a chance to tell their own story.
The idea was so good that Goss extended it into a trilogy, starting with The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter — you can read Helen’s review of the first book here. I’ve read the novel, too, and though I enjoyed it, found the premise stretched somewhat thin by the end. For me, the short-story version was just the right length, amusing and thought-provoking without belaboring the point. After this, I was looking forward to what other enchantments Goss had in store.
Next came “Dora/Dóra: An Autobiography,” one of several stories playing with the idea of alternate realities, as Goss imagines a fictional version of herself who stayed in Soviet-controlled Hungary rather than emigrating to America with her mother in the 1970s. How much do we really know about ourselves, about the matrix out of which we originated? How easily could another outcome have resulted from the same materials, or maybe — somehow, somewhere — actually be unfolding? From imagining and wondering about an Other Self, the narrator moves on to coming face to face with her, which might be expected to spark an existential crisis. But one of the things I like about these stories is that though they are not afraid to name the darkness, they keep coming back to the bonds of connection that strengthen us in the midst of overwhelming threat. Deadly monsters, exiled from human society, set up housekeeping together; and after a lifetime spent in the shadow of the Secret Police, Dóra invites Dora to go out for ice cream. Fears dissipate in the light of a reality that does not have to be defined by past trauma.
Not all the stories have such comforting outcomes, and several of them envisage fantasyland bleeding into our ordinary reality with alarming results. When the White Witch from Narnia invades England, the drive for security triumphs over love. Abused girls from our world find their way to Oz, and beneath the ebullient surface of that inventive land a chilling plan unfolds. After a group of kids idly make up a country in political turmoil, the imaginary revolution ends up capturing one of their fathers. The imagination can undeniably be dangerous, leading us into territory we didn’t anticipate and can’t handle. But I think all the stories speak to an underlying hope that the imagination can also point us toward healing. By bringing together what has been sundered by the tyranny of our ordinary consciousness, refusing to be bound by ancestral notions of how things must be, it opens a door to freedom. Stepping through the door of freedom is always perilous, but what is the price of avoiding it? These stories bring that question to our attention, and dare us to answer it for ourselves.
In a couple of my favorite pieces, characters from nineteenth-century novels get to change their depressing fates. In “Pug,” the voiceless Anne de Bourgh from Pride and Prejudice finds a literal doorway that leads her out of loneliness; in “Estella Saves the Village,” Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter from Great Expectations is an agent of positive, constructive forces rather than a tool for revenge. Both stories, like the one that led off the collection, involve characters from different books meeting, interacting, and creating a new narrative not bound by the limitations of the old. Yet Goss clearly has affection for and deep knowledge of her literary sources. She’s not trashing the canon, but seeing it from a different angle, widening our perspective.
And surely that’s what reading literature should be all about: widening our field of experience, trying out new ways of seeing that can enrich the one we most often rely on. Just as Dóra can exist alongside Dora, we can hold both views in a creative tension, breaking out of the dull routines we so easily fall into. Thus the final story, “The Secret Diary of Mina Harker,” slyly subverts the surface interpretation of Dracula, giving the female character Bram Stoker made subordinate to her mansplaining companions a destiny far more worthy of her intelligence and courage, if less conventional. It made me wonder what “secret diaries” we might find between the pages of other familiar tales, or of our own lives.
Inventing such an alternate history requires a sense of humor, not laugh-out-loud slapstick, but the kind of leavening, loosening-up spirit that has kept oppressed people alive throughout history. I can’t think of anything more needed in our time than the ability to imagine different outcomes, to find hope in the shadow of oppression, to choose life and community over loneliness and despair. I’m certainly glad I encountered Theodora Goss’s expansive, generous storytelling at this particular moment, and I’ll be looking forward to whatever she produces next.
Though you can find much of Goss’s writing on the internet (see this page on her website: https://theodoragoss.com/stories/), I encourage you to spring for this collection, which handily brings together so many terrific stories, sixteen in all, with three never published before. Notes from the author about the origin and creation of each story are also included, which extended my enjoyment even more. In the words of Jo Walton’s introduction, “Stop reading this right now and go ahead and read the stories. There is such a joy of reading and delight of discovery ahead for you!” Yes, indeed. Now, let the stories speak for themselves.
Lory Widmer Hess blogs at enterenchanted.com and has the luck to live in Switzerland, a country both magical and real.
Theodora Goss, Letters from an Imaginary Country (Tachyon Books, 2025). 978-1616964405, 352pp., paperback original.
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