The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: A True Victorian Medical Mystery
On June 8, 1865, eighteen-year-old Mollie Fancher went shopping in Brooklyn, New York. Two months short of her nineteenth birthday, she was tall, well made, willowy, with light wavy hair and an oval face.

Chapter 1: The Accident, Part 2
The psychologist Rollo May argued at mid-twentieth century that the roots of the modern 'age of anxiety'; (as W. H. Auden christened it in his 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning poem) were planted one hundred years before, in the world that Mollie Fancher knew.

Chapter 1: The Accident, Part 3
An inventive feature-writer for the New York Herald (anonymous, as was usually the case in nineteenth-century newspapers) in December 1878 contributed a long front-page story that gives the flavor of traveling on yet another innovation

During the Victorian age-a time when even respectable newspapers had a tabloid edge-some of the world's most renowned and controversial celebrities were women who could allegedly abstain from eating for months or even years at a time. In The Fasting Girl, acclaimed journalist Michelle Stacey tells the story of Mollie Fancher, a young Brooklyn woman who became "the most famous sick person in the world" because of her claim to have lived for more than a decade without food.

Lauded by Entertainment Weekly as one of the top ten books of 2002 and compared by the Chicago Tribune to Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, this elegantly written, compulsively readable cultural history intertwines topics as diverse as eating disorders, Charles Darwin, and the nature of entertainment and celebrity. "Mystic, hysteric, anorexic, or freak, Mollie Fancher was only one thing for sure: a hunger artist who played her audience for decades," wrote The Village Voice. "It took a probing writer like Stacey to give her a riveting second run."

Michelle Stacey, the author of Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate, and Fear Food, is a journalist who writes extensively for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Allure..

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