"The Doll Factory" by Elizabeth Macneal

London. The Great Exhibition is under construction.

Silas, 37 is a taxidermist, a loner. He's interested in oddities, but makes money from selling preserved butterflies as ornaments, and pickled dove hearts to apothecaries. He dialogues with the dead animals and absent people. He visits whores.

Iris (humpback, a painter) and Rose (smallpox scars, a needleworker) are identical twins, early twenties, working for Mrs Salter, a dollmaker. The dolls are replicas made from daguerrotypes - sometimes of dead babies.

Albee, 10, collects animal corpses for Silas, and delivers sewn dresses to the dollmaker. He's also a pick-pocket. He wants to buy false teeth for himself. He lives with her sister, a whore

Silas and Iris are both artists. Silas and the dollmakers both try to preserve the dead.

Rose confiscates Iris's paints and paintings, thinking the paintings lewd. Iris is asked to be a model by Louis Frost, a pre-Raphaelite. She agrees in exchange for art lessons. She has to give up her job and the accommodation. Her sister and parents threaten to disown her.

Louis is good to her, respectful. He has a pet wombat Guinevere.

Silas drinks at the same pub as the pre-Raphaelites. Rossetti's a client of his. Silas will have something exhibited at the Great Exhibition. The PRB want to be in the Summer Exhibition.

Iris and Louis start sleeping together though Louis is still married. Iris can afford to help her sister and Albee.

Silas stalks Iris. He's killed a target of his unrequited love before. He buys choroform and plans to abduct her. Albee's suspicious of Silas and is protective of his sister and Iris. He dies in a road accident.

Silas keeps Iris in his cellar for about 10 days. Twice she's nearly discovered. Then she escapes. The final section is a review of one of her paintings.

In an interview at the end of the book the author says it's important that Iris escapes without help rather than be rescued by a man. The male gaze is supposed to be a theme.

Other reviews

• Anna Carey (a book that manages to be both a page-turning thriller and a thoughtful, moving exploration of what it meant to be a woman and an artist in the 19th century.)
• Clive Edwards (This is like Dickens in overdrive, but overlaid with a very modern sense of the darkness beneath and a taste for the macabre and twisted that brings to life the true horrors of Victorian London.)
• Goodreads