The Skull of Charlotte Corday

Dark, witty, and entertaining, The Skull of Charlotte Corday and Other Stories is Leslie Dick's searing exploration of the impossibility of being a woman. The stories return insistently to the innermost dilemmas of femininity, spinning strange tales of medical humiliation, sexual betrayal, perverse eroticism, and the unsettling traumas of child rearing. The title story, "The Skull of Charlotte Corday, " tells the tale of the beautiful assassin who, at the onset of the Great Terror, murdered the French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat in his bath. After her public execution, Corday's skull, a rich prize in the head-trading industry of the day, found its way into the hands of a descendant of Napoleon, Princess Marie Bonaparte, who was to become a pioneer psychoanalyst. Leslie Dick skillfully interweaves the astonishing stories of these two women, their melodramatic lives linked by a macabre trophy.