His Monkey Wife

In the author’s own words: “This is a strange book…an emotional melodrama, complete with a Medusa villainess, an honest simpleton of a hero, and an angelic if only anthropoid heroine, all functioning in the two dimensional world of the old Lyceum poster or the primitive fresco…where an angel may outsize a church, and where a man may marry a monkey on a foggy day.”—from John Collier’s “A Looking Glass”

When Alfred Fatigay returns to his native London, he brings along his trustworthy pet chimpanzee Emily who, unbeknownst to Fatigay, has become civilized: literate, literary—and in love with Fatigay himself. After Emily meets Alfred’s fiancée Amy Flint, a 1920’s “modern woman,” she sets out to save her beloved from Amy’s cold grip. “Emily is the perfect outside observer,” writes Eva Brann in her introduction, “because she is an African in Europe, a female in a man’s world, a servant to liberated sophisticates, and above all an old-fashioned creature in a modern world.”