In 2001, a woman's skeleton was found in the woods overlooking
Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital. Despite an audit of the hospital's
patient records, a forensic reconstruction of the woman's face,
missing-person appeals, and DNA tests that revealed not only where she
had lived but how she ate, the woman was never identified. Assigned the
name Madame Victoria, her remains were placed in a box in an evidence
room and eventually forgotten.
But not by Catherine Leroux, who constructs in her form-bending Madame
Victoria 12 different histories for the unknown woman. Like musical
variations repeating a theme, each Victoria meets her end only after
Leroux resurrects her, replacing the anonymous circumstances of her
death with a vivid reimagining of her possible lives. And in doing so,
Madame Victoria becomes much more than the story of one unknown and
unnamed woman: it becomes a celebration of the lives and legacies of
unknown women everywhere.
By turns elegiac, playful, poignant, and tragic, Madame Victoria is an
unforgettable book about the complexities of individual lives and the
familiar ways in which they overlap.
