“Life swarms with innocent monsters”*…
Julia Pastrana, a woman from Mexico born with hypertrichosis, became one of the most famous human curiosities of the 19th century, exhibited the world over as a “bearded lady” while both alive and dead. Bess Lovejoy explores her story and how it was only in 2013, 153 years after her passing, that she was finally laid to rest…
Read through to the too-long-delayed happy ending at “Julia Pastrana: A ‘Monster to the Whole World’.”
* Charles Baudelaire
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As we celebrate humanity in its rich totality, we might recall that it was on this date in 1859 that Wilkie Collin’s The Woman In White began its serial run in Charles Dickens’ magazine All the Year Round (in the UK; it began an American run three days earlier in Harper’s Weekly). Among the first mystery novels (and the first–and arguably the finest– in the genre of “sensation novels“), it was published in book form in 1860.
Cover of first US edition