Mary Mallon is certainly a controversial figure, and Keane has created a truly layered and vibrant portrait of this woman. Mary continues to resist testing and will not allow the doctors to remove her gall bladder, where they believe the germs are manufactured, so she is ultimately kept in isolation on a remote island in the East River for more than a quarter century. Soper, takes note of this and traces Mary’s movements until he becomes convinced that she is the source of the contagion-a healthy carrier of Typhoid fever.Īfter Soper confronts Mary and she refuses to go with him for testing, he has her arrested and placed into quarantine. But many families she cooks for fall ill with typhoid fever. But who was Typhoid Mary? In her rich, sympathetic, provocative historical novel Fever, Mary Beth Keane explores the woman behind the infamy.Īt the end of the nineteenth century, Mary Mallon emigrates from Ireland to New York City and works hard to climb the domestic service ladder until she becomes a sought-after cook for wealthy New York families. It is a name so well-known it has become an idiom in American English, referring to a transmitter not just of disease, but of anything harmful or catastrophic.
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