In Louisa Hall’s ‘Reproduction,’ Motherhood Is Otherworldy

Louisa Hall’s novel Reproduction centers on a writing professor who struggles to conceive, give birth to, and then parent a young daughter all while attempting to write a “biographical novel” about Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Hall’s unnamed protagonist, who is also the novel’s narrator, is teaching a course on science fiction and re-reading Frankenstein, and soon, the course and the book begin to seep into her everyday life, which takes on an otherworldly strangeness. When she suffers a miscarriage, she feels as if she is “floating in the coldness of space”; her hospital visit for a D&C, performed by masked doctors in a cold, bare room—like “a capsule sent into space”—is surreal and disorienting.

Set in our recent American past, and spanning the years of the pandemic, the novel’s present feels uniquely fraught: Reproductive rights are under fresh attack with the fall of Roe, mass shootings spur fear and panic,, a “ghost story” about the reanimation of corpses, , after suffering the loss of her own newborn baby. The narrative details of Shelley’s life take up a good chunk of ’s first section, with Shelley’s voice, from snippets of her journal entries and other writings, including ’s preface, interwoven with the narrator’s own.