Disclosing Carol Hart — Steven Moore
All my reading life, I’ve been attracted to and written about learned, maximalist, ostentatiously erudite novels, and have noticed that it’s largely a male genre. I’ve often wondered—and have been asked by interviewers—why that’s so. In an interview years ago, I answered, “One obvious historical reason is education. Until recently, few women had the same level of education that male maximalists enjoyed, and lacked their huge vocabulary and prodigious reading. The few women who did, like the 17th-century Margaret Cavendish, were looked upon as freaks. Educational advances over the last century haven’t produced that many female maximalists, but any explanation for that will lead to gender issues that I’d prefer to skirt.” Over the years I’ve mentioned many female novelists unafraid to show some bookish cleavage, such as Djuna Barnes, Frances Newman, Rikki Ducornet, Greer Gilman, Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Carole Maso, Susan Daitch, and Helen DeWitt, to limit myself to Americans. One more learned lady who should be added to the list is Carol Hart, author of two extraordinary novels—and I mean literally, beyond the ordinary.
A few months after the first volume of my The Novel: An Alternative History came out, I received an email from Dr. Hart, who suggested I might be interested in a novel she had just self-published entitled A History of the Novel in Ants (SpringStreet Books, 2010). How could I resist a title like that? I duly bought and read it, and then mentioned it in a footnote in the second volume of my revisionist history (2013) where, after a riverine three-page list of novels influenced by Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, I noted the scarcity of female writers in his learned wit tradition:
That list, you’ve probably noticed, is a total sausage fest: the daughters of Tristram Shandy might include Djuna Barnes’s Ryder, Virgina Woolf’s Orlando, Brigid Brophy’s In Transit, Julieta Campos’s Fear of Losing Eurydice, Gabrielle Burton’s Heartbreak Hotel, Jaimy Gordon’s Shamp of the City-Solo , Janice Galloway’s Trick Is to Keep Breathing (“This book resembles Tristram Shandy as rewritten by Sylvia Plath”—New York Times Book Review), Sarah Schulman’s Empathy, Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries, Helen DeWitt’s Last Samurai, Heather Woodbury’s What Ever, Cintra Wilson’s Colors Insulting to Nature, Vanessa Place’s La Medusa, Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, Emilie Autumn’s Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, Carol Hart’s History of the Novel in Ants, Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, certain novels by Kathy Acker, Christine Brooke-Rose, Rikki Ducornet, Thalia Field, Xiaolu Guo, Carole Maso, Ali Smith, and Aritha Van Herk, and some formally innovative YA novels by the likes of Susie Day, E. Lockhart, and Lauren Myracle. But Sterne’s cocktail of comic erudition, slap-and-tickle sexuality, bittersweet sentimentalism, and achronological form doesn’t seem to attract many women writers—or women readers, according to Professor Elizabeth Terries. She says in her career she’s taught Tristram Shandy to nearly 500 female students, and estimates “not more than twenty enjoyed reading Sterne’s work or will ever return to it.” (815n270)
On the back cover of A History of the Novel in Ants, Hart describes herself as “a freelance science writer with a rusty PhD in English Literature,” but there’s no rust on this tour de force. (Note 1) Like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Hart’s novel is a multigenerational family saga, with two outlandish differences: it concerns ants rather than humans, and progresses chronologically by way of genres of the novel, as announced by the Table of Contents:
Picaresque Ant 1
Epistolary Ant 35
Gothic Romance Ant 55
Manners Ant 83
Literary Realism Ant 109
Point-of-View Ant 147
Stream-of-consciousness Ant 179
Postwar Dystopian Ant 195
Postmodern Postcolonial Ant 237
Magic Realism Ant 277
Each chapter begins with a page of scholarly quotations on ants and the featured genre, allowing the novel to function as a tutorial on both ants and the historical development of the novel. The quotations from entomologists are especially useful; nowhere is Coleridge’s call for a “willing suspension of disbelief” more necessary than with an anthropomorphized animal story, yet according to those myrmecologists, humankind has more in common with antkind than expected.
One line of descent for the novel would begin with picaresque narratives, which were born in Spain in the 16th century and emigrated to England in the 17th. They are typically rough and tumble coming-of-age stories, in which an outcast learns the sleazier ways of the world. Hart’s picara is nicknamed Thrip, the runt of the litter of a queen ant’s brood. Neglected by her mother and bullied by her royal sisters, Thrip becomes an individualist in a homogenous society, and though she slowly recognizes the injustices in her communal society, she doesn’t question them. The chapter ends when she reaches sexual maturity and swarms out of the colony into the air with her sisters for an extraordinary, violent mating scene.
As in most picaresque novels, the prose in the first chapter is fairly straightforward, but it turns elegant and formal in the second, in which Thrip exchanges “letters” with her mother after she has founded her own colony and begins reproducing her own brood. (Thrip has taught a rove beetle familiar with the “Antic” language to deliver her epistles orally.) Epistolary novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) often doubled as conduct guides, full of advice for living a conventional, socially acceptable life, which is what Thrip gets from her distant mother. She addresses her first letter “Dearest Moma,” but the latter always signs off “The Queen Your Mother, Regina Formicidarum, Semiomyrmex fabularis.” (Note 2) The class conflicts Thrip had witnessed in the first chapter—and as any reader witnesses in most 18th-century British novels—are reiterated here as she begins to accept her mother’s monarchial point of view: “Surely what distinguishes us from the beasts is the harmonious hierarchy of our society, in which (aside from the laggards and the bullies, of course) all the workers cooperate and share, acting in unity, each performing her proper task, each sacrificing her own interests for those of her Queen Mother and sisters” (43). Thrip’s lingering sympathy for individualism is squashed by her mother: “What you call individuals I call mistakes. Whenever an ant perceives herself as me rather than we, as a singularity rather than a part, she is a threat to social harmony.” Her final advice to her daughter is “do not trust the workers” (43, 54).
And so it goes. The language turns sumptuous and sensational for third chapter, which features a young ant named Carina, an individualist like her Queen Mother Thrip (“approaching the end of the fifth year of reign”) and likewise bullied by her sisters. In this word-perfect pastiche of the late-18th century Gothic novel, Carina survives several terrifying attempts on her life while guarding family secrets. Apart from corrupt Catholicism, all the classic Gothic tropes are here, and the result is thrilling. Its dark setting gives way to the light world of Jane Austen for next chapter, in which the next generation of royal virgins prepares for the nuptial flight that was so traumatic for young Thrip. She rejoins the cast with a matriarchal concern for the coming-out “assembly,” for which Carina—reduced in status to “a mature but respectable worker ant”—hopes to advance her son, “an insect endowed with greater sensibility than sense” (89). Janeites would have a ball with this delightful chapter; I’m sure Hart had Austen in mind when she wrote “his aunt’s instructive observations on ant society were couched in a biting, acidulous wit that the good-natured drone often failed to comprehend” (90–91). The chapter concludes with a kind of wedding, per genre expectations, but with a sting in the tail.
As the language in the novel progresses, becoming more stylistically varied, one is reminded of Joyce’s “Oxen in the Sun” episode in Ulysses, which mimics the evolution of English from Anglo-Saxon to modern slang.
Not to give too much more of the plot away, the rest of the novel begins dealing more with life outside the anthill, in more realistic language, and with a wider variety of characters, each with personal quirks and eccentricities. (The cast remains overwhelming female—male drones are only for breeding.) Chapter V, set during the ninth year of Queen Thrip’s reign, is a war story between her colony and that of her surprisingly-still-living mother, Regina Formicidarum; one of the chapter’s epigraphs comes from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and another from Richard Dawkins: “True warfare in which large rival armies fight to the death is known only in man and social insects” (110). The point-of-view known as free indirect discourse is demonstrated in Chapter VI, about an ingenue learning her place in the stilted court of aging Queen Thrip, narrated in a delicious pastiche of Henry James (specifically The Wings of the Dove). But ant society has changed since Thrip’s communal, conformist day; mirroring the rise of individualism in 19th-century America, the Jamesian narrator notes:
Over the whole history of the society, it seemed as though each fresh generation was more striving, more on the lookout, more indifferent to traditional decencies than those they displaced. These new ants, from a generation unplanned, novel in its timing, seemed determined to make a break with the past and all its time-honored constraints. They had been brought into being to put an end to the war; they behaved as though they would put an end to everything. (168) (Note 3)
Chapter VI segues into Chapter VII, a deathbed monologue by Queen Trip in the stream-of-consciousness style of Joyce and Woolf, with Molly Bloomy memories that are quite touching.
She is attended in her final hours by a large foraging ant called Old Major, who narrates Chapter VIII, a dystopian account of the postwar ant colony, with lines from Huxley, Orwell, and Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale scattered throughout the story. (It is the only chapter divided into titled mini-chapters.) By this point, if not earlier, it becomes obvious that Hart’s novel is also an allegory of the rise and fall of Western society, dramatizing the disintegration of a class system where everyone knew their place.
Hart brings out all the bells and whistles of postmodernism for the penultimate chapter, which adds little to the ongoing story but loads of further information about ants and myrmecology scholarship, all delivered in a relaxed, playful manner. Its page of quotations includes passages from postmodernists who have written about ants (Borges, Cortázar, Calvino) (Note 4), but the author self-referentially reminds the reader that the novel is essentially “a female art form,” mostly written and read by women. Historically, many are “stories of handsome, good-hearted foundlings who win heiresses and of young ladies lacking dowries who, not without struggle, find love and happiness. Here we have a novel in which the mammalian rules are reversed: the females are in charge; the males are decorative. Won’t female readers be fascinated with these six-legged amazons, as I am?” (251). She also offers a preview of the final chapter, but that is preceded by the grim second half of Chapter IX (“Postcolonial Ant”), which has four narrators—Old Major from Chapter VIII, plus three younger ants from the warring colonies—suffering as emigrants as they search for a new home. At the end, the only two left are Old Major from Thrip’s colony and “Young Keen,” the last daughter of Regina Formicidarum.
Young Keen’s niece, “a very large princess, the last of an illustrious lineage” (279), is the protagonist of the final chapter, “Magic Realism Ant.” This must have challenged the author, because a novel about talking ants already blurs the distinction between reality and fantasy. But Hart met the challenge with the most dazzling chapter in the book. Spiteful court intrigue surrounds the princess, who hears ancestral voices and is considered an imbecile by most, as plans are made for her nuptial flight. What follows is a dizzying sequence of explicit sex scenes, an imitation of The 1001 Nights—the medieval mother of magic realism—authorial reflections on narratology and readers’ tastes—and finally the princess’s daring aerial voyage to found a new colony. (We’re told, by the way, that the entire novel has been taking place “in the front yard of [a] derelict farmhouse, now tenantless, soon to give way to two luxury homes” [306].) For me, the erudite chapter evokes not the Latin American writers with whom magic realism is associated, but John Barth, Rikki Ducornet, and especially Robert Coover. The chapter, and novel, ends with a playful allusion to Karel Ĉapek’s War with the Newts (1936), another scholarly, formally inventive animal story.
Although A History of the Novel in Ants may sound like a clever stunt, it is a stunningly creative treatment of themes dramatized in standard fiction: relations between men and women, between humans and animals, individualistic vs. communal behavior, feminism, class distinctions, the challenges of motherhood, the plight of immigrants, the breakdown of traditional values (and political systems), and so forth, but with the added appeal of expert pastiches of the principal novelistic genres of the last 400 years. It is not merely one of if not the best novels about ants ever published—by a remarkable coincidence, E. O. Wilson, often cited in Hart’s novel, published a novel the same year entitled Anthill—but probably the most innovative English-language novel published in 2010. (Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Adam Levin’s The Instructions, and Joshua Cohen’s Witz appeared that year, though my vote would still go to Hart.) Unfortunately, its status as a self-published POD book caused it to go unnoticed. According to WorldCat, only one library in America has a copy. Hart apparently spent the next few years on her deeply researched edition of The Ingoldsby Legends, but she had one more tricky novel up her sleeve.
In 2022, I learned that Hart’s SpringStreet Books had published the previous year a critical edition of an obscure, late-17th-century novel ascribed to John Milton’s daughter Deborah entitled Marius & Delia. Having written about the early modern British novel, I bought and read this curiosity, and was blown away by it. Resembling an elegant, elaborate production from a university press, it begins with a lengthy introduction by the editor, Margo Quigley of Fudler State University (with 103 endnotes), followed by a historical timeline, the text of the 190-page novel, 23 pages of explanatory notes, five critical essays on the novel by various scholars, a detailed textual note, and a 15-page legal deposition of the discoverer of the manuscript, conducted in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, in 2017. The novel ends with the prospectus for a new literary journal, Deborah Milton Studies, and the tentative contents of the first issue, due out in February 2022. It even came with a customized bookmark.
Eager to spread the word, I posted this review on Amazon.com on 11 January 2023:
This is the first trade edition of a stunningly sophisticated novel that has been under the radar for the last 325 years. If it is what editor Margo Quigley says it is, Marius & Delia is a major addition to the canon, as well as an entertaining read for anyone who likes historical/political novels set in the late 17th century (not to mention historians of the period). She estimates that it was published around 1696, based on datable events in the novel. Only one copy appears to have survived, then was lost.
The story goes that a PhD student stumbled upon it in 1969 in a private library in England, secretly began transcribing it, then decided to steal it, then lost it. He claims that on the title page it was attributed to Milton’s daughter Deborah, but since no other copy has been found, there’s no way to verify any of this. He failed to interest any publishers, who were naturally wary of his claims, so he brought out a very limited edition in 1975 and—get this—claimed copyright for a novel written by someone else. In 2004 he created a POD version, available only from the publisher, which is no longer on sale. This selfish, greedy, litigious, self-confessed thief is our only source for the novel, and for its attribution.
If legit, this highly accomplished novel is the culmination of multiple paths taken by English novelists in the second half of the 17th century, from the “political romances” of the 1650s to Cervantine parodies and picaresque novels, to the daring novels of Aphra Behn, crime-confession novels and things like the anonymous London Jilt (1683), up to experimental novels like Dunton’s Voyage round the World (1691). It’s odd that neither the editor or the five critics who furnished essays at the end of this scholarly edition mention a single British novel from the 17th century, and the cover’s claim that Marius & Delia is “the first English novel” is uninformed: the first actually appeared in 1553 (Baldwin’s Beware the Cat), and I’ve read and written about seventy English novels that appeared before 1695—and that’s only among the extant ones. Many more have been lost, as Marius & Delia almost was. Of all the English novels I’ve read published between 1553 and 1695, this would be in my top five.
The novel is filled with sharply observed details of daily life, is written in vigorous, colorful, sometimes sardonic prose—surprisingly coarse at times—and displays a close acquaintance with all the political upheavals from the civil war onward. It features the kind of self-conscious narrator who would become more common in the 18th century; he addresses the reader occasionally, and even discusses conversations he had with Delia later in her life. Her father Marius, a hack political pamphleteer and alchemist who at times sounds like the narrator of Swift’s Tale of a Tub, develops “a new species of writing” (p. 34), a phrase used by mid-18th novelists like Richardson and Fielding. The same can be said of Deborah Milton, if indeed she’s the one who wrote this major novel. Get it before it goes out of print and sinks back into obscurity.
I withheld my suspicions that the novel may have been written a little later (1710s?) and by a man—the latter to dodge kneejerk accusations of sexism, but also because I really wanted to believe that it was written by long-suffering Deborah. (Note 5) I swallowed the explanation that this was being published by a small press in Pennsylvania rather than a university press because of the novel’s dodgy origin story and potential legal challenges by that PhD student. It wasn’t until August 2025 that I realized it was all an elaborate hoax written by the publisher. The previous year she had published poems in a few journals and effectively outed herself in the contributor’s notes she supplied: “Carol Hart earned a PhD in Renaissance English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, which somehow led to a career as a health and science writer. Now retired, she’s the author of two works of fiction, A History of the Novel in Ants (2010) and Marius & Delia, by D. M. (2021), both published by SpringStreet Books. Her poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Roanoke Review, and Paperbark. She lives in the Philadelphia suburbs.” (Note 6)
Marius & Delia wasn’t a late 17th-century novel by Deborah Milton but an early 21st-century fabrication by Carol Hart. Not premodern but postmodern. Well, I’ll be damned.
Neither the book’s back cover description or the publisher’s website hinted this was a cunning counterfeit, and so authentic-sounding was the novel and the critical apparatus that I missed some obvious clues. A few minutes online would have revealed that there was no such place as Fudler State University, or such scholar as Margo Quigley, or any of the other contributors. There are blurbs on the back cover by academics from Charleton College and Barnum University, which likewise should have tipped me off: Charleton is obviously a homonym for “charlatan,” and no university is named after P. T. Barnum. (Note 7) I’ll stand by my Amazon evaluation of the novel itself—it is indeed a first-rate, complex historical narrative in period-accurate prose—and the critical essays are insightful and certainly consistent with current academic criticism, for better or for worse. (That is, they don’t scream parody like the essays in Frederick Crews’s classic Pooh Perplex.) I was initially outraged by prospective journal’s editor’s guidelines for contributors, but didn’t realize until later it satirized theory-addled academics:
. . . We do not limit contributions to any particular theoretical-methodological paradigm: new historicist, cultural materialist, feminist, psychoanalytic and Marxist readings are all welcomed—as are, of course, Bakhtinian, Baudrillardian, Deleuzian and Derridean approaches. We do not publish undertheorized readings, nor are we interested in belletristic expositions of meaning or authorial intention. The editors prize richly textured, theoretically sophisticated explorations of the text’s unsettling discourses of gender, patriarchy and class. . . .
Few academics today would bat an eye at such expectations, another reason why I didn’t suspect I was being played. A year after my Amazon review appeared, I emailed Hart to ask if the journal had appeared yet. Still playing the game, she responded, “Regrettably, no. The editors were unable to obtain the necessary funding.” On 22 December 2024, I emailed her again to ask if anyone had written about the novel, especially Milton scholars. She did not reply. By August 2025 the SpringStreet Books website had disappeared, and I deleted my review from Amazon. But I didn’t feel cheated; instead, my admiration for the real author of this concoction soared. I could even identify with Margo Quigley, who fell for the PhD’s questionable discovery. (That’s a whole story-within-a-story in this multilayered novel.) To write an authentic-sounding 17th-century novel, and then encase it in equally authentic-sounding critical discourse is an astonishing achievement that few writers could pull off.
Hart’s Marius & Delia is not merely an exceptional 18th-century pastiche like Barth’s Sot-Weed Factor or Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, but a species of hybrid literature, specifically a fiction in the form of a nonfiction book. Call them faux fictions, fiction in nonfiction drag. The classic example is Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where a 999-line epic poem is presented in a critical-edition format (foreword, commentary, index). Similar less-known examples would be Herbert Lindenberger’s Saul’s Fall: A Critical Fiction (1979), modeled on Norton Critical Editions, as are David Mamet’s Wilson (2001) and Samuel Delany’s Phallos (the “Enhanced and Revised Edition” of 2013); Austin M. Wright’s Recalcitrance, Faulkner, & the Professors: A Critical Fiction (1990), a novel in the form of critical responses to As I Lay Dying; and Arthur Phillips’s The Tragedy of Arthur (2011), which includes the entire text of a previously unknown Shakespeare play.
Conventional readers may regard such novels as stunts, freaks, undeserving of the term “novel,” unaware of the panoply of examples in literary history. This heterodox hybrid genre also includes novels in the form of historical studies (Washington Irving’s History of New York, Eric Larsen’s Decline and Fall of the American Nation), academic biographies (Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse, Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Marbot, C. D. Rose’s Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure), scholarly editions of letters (Ingo Schulze's New Lives), literary interviews (Bohumil Hrabal's Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp), PhD theses (R. M. Koster’s Dissertation), college quarterlies (Jerome Charyn’s Tar Baby), literary anthologies (Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea), mathematical treatises (Suri and Bal’s A Certain Ambiguity), fictional studies of fictitious books (Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones, Stanisław Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude, C. D. Rose’s Who’s Who When Everyone Is Somebody Else), travel guides and gazetteers (Jean Ricardou's Place Names, Chandler Brossard's Postcards, Karen Gordon's Paris Out of Hand, Michael Martone's Blue Guide to Indiana, Aravind Adiga's Between the Assassinations, Rick Moody’s Hotels of North America, M. J. Nicholls’s UK trilogy), foreign-language phrasebooks (Norah Labiner's German for Travelers), appendices (A. M. Homes’s Appendix A), footnotes (Mark Dunn’s Ibid), indexes (Suzanne Scanlon’s Her 37th Year), theological treatises (Samuel Butler’s A Fair Haven), exams (Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice), pedagogical handbooks (Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, Stanley Crawford’s Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood), ethnographic studies (LeGuin’s Always Coming Home), auction catalogs (Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris), and novels in the form of dictionaries and encyclopedias. (Note 8)
The crucial difference between all these and Marius & Delia is that they are clearly fictions, with their real-life authors identified on the cover and title page. Hart’s name appears only twice; near the end of Quigley’s introduction, anticipating “resistance in the broader academic community,” she tells us she “took the initiative of contacting Carol Hart at SpringStreet Books, a small niche publisher specializing in scholarly editions of neglected authors” (xxxv). Hart is also named as a co-defendant in the legal deposition at the end (278). (Note 9) Unlike A History of the Novel in Ants, it was copyrighted not in Hart’s name but in the publisher’s. Even the Library of Congress catalogues it under Deborah Milton’s name. Consequently, Hart’s novel appears to belong to a different tradition, that of the forged literary work.
The culprits of that tradition include such spurious works as Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley poems and James Macpherson’s Ossian epics, but also some foundational works in English literature. The original title page of Robinson Crusoe claims that the book was written “Written by Himself,” and Lemuel Gulliver is accredited with Travels into Several Nations of the World, affirmed by the publisher in a preface. None of the early editions of The Dunciad have Alexander Pope’s name on the title page, only that of his ridiculous “editor,” Martinus Scriblerus. Richardson’s name didn’t appear on the title page of Pamela, implying it is an actual collection of letters written by one Pamela Andrews. Umberto Eco succinctly defines forgery as “any text whose actual provenance differs from what it is made out to be,” which would thus include those four, along with any number of early novels that claimed to be based on an uncovered manuscript or cache of letters.
Mark Osteen, who quotes Eco’s definition in the prologue to his Fake It: Fictions of Forgery (University of Virginia Press, 2021), demonstrates that forgers have a variety of motives, from benign to malign. The latter would include those who forge works merely for financial gain and/or fame, neither of which could have motivated Hart. Even if someone had discovered an authentic novel by Deborah Milton, it probably would have attracted little attention beyond that of specialists in the field. (A previously unknown novel by her father would be a different matter.) Nor was she out to defraud anyone of the $17.95 or whatever they paid for it; I don’t know how many copies the book has sold, but surely not enough to compensate for the years of work that obviously went into its creation, nor did she expect it to cause a big sensation. I suspect it was more for the reasons Osteen discusses in the case of Lee Israel, who in the 1990s forged and sold letters from a variety of celebrities, an activity she later regarded as “larky and fun and totally cool. . . . I was a better writer as a forger than I had ever been as a writer.” After quoting her, Osteen comments: “Israel’s forgeries empowered her to discover her writerly self. Often forgeries are the forgers’ best work because the spurious name [Deborah Milton, in Hart’s case] liberates them from constraining habits and oppressive expectations. In forging texts, they reforge themselves. These writers, like critics and actors, use another artist to ignite their creative fires. . . . Israel’s description of the [Dorothy] Parker forgeries as ‘larky and fun’ could have been written by any forger or hoaxer, because these activities partake of the spirit of play: forgery is a contest, a performance, often a practical joke” (1). I would dismiss the practical joke motive in Hart’s case, but it is apparent that Hart challenged herself to forge an exemplary critical edition of a 17th-century novel, and had fun doing it. A labor of love, surely, not a sneaky scam.
Like her first novel, Hart’s mischievous masterpiece doesn’t appear to have been reviewed anywhere apart from my Amazon acclamation, even on Goodreads. As Quigley writes in the first paragraph of her introduction, “Its literary quality and iconoclastic originality have yet to be fully assessed. . . .”
To have created either A History of the Novel in Ants or Marius & Delia, by D. M. would be admirable enough, but to have created two such different tours de force qualifies Carol Hart as one of the most brilliant novelists of our time. Readers who live for erudite, innovative novels should seek her out; like me, you may wind up wanting a bumper sticker that reads I ♥ HART.
***
NOTES
1 Before turning to fiction, Dr. Hart published three nonfiction books: Secrets of Serotonin: The Natural Hormone That Curbs Food and Alcohol Cravings, Reduces Pain, and Elevates Your Mood (St. Martin’s Press, 1996; rev. ed. 2008); Traditional Chinese Medicine: The A–Z Guide to Natural Healing from the Orient (with Magnolia Goh; Dell, 1997); and Good Food Tastes Good: An Argument for Trusting Your Senses & Ignoring the Nutritionists (SpringStreet Books, 2007). In 2013 SpringStreet published Hart’s annotated, two-volume edition of The Ingoldsby Legends (1840–47), a once-popular farrago of folklore, legends, pastiches, and parodies written by Richard Harris Barham under the pseudonym Thomas Ingoldsby of Tappington Manor. It is the best edition of the book currently available.
2 This seems to be a rare typo on Hart’s part for Seriomyrmex, a genus of fungus-growing ants in the subfamily Myrmicinae. (Or perhaps the rove beetle misheard the queen.) Fabularis means fable-like, fictitious.
3 I Googled that final clause to see if it was a quote from James, and its AI factotum informed me that “The sentiment, while not a direct quote, is very much in his style.” How about that?!
4 Hart doesn’t mention Joyce, but Finnegans Wake includes an episode called “The Ondt and the Gracehopper” (NY: Viking, 1939, 414–19), based on the Aesop fable and buzzing with insect puns.
5 To clarify: I’ve read dozens of novels by 17th-century women, but there are a few extremely coarse passages in Marius & Delia that none of them would have dared to write, much less publish.
6 Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics 31.3 (Winter 2024). A similar note appeared in the Roanoke Review, accompanied by a striking photograph of the author: https://www.roanokereview.org/poetry2024/carol-hart.
7 The Barnum blurber is named C. A. Borengasser. In 2008, SpringStreet Books published a slim book entitled Cat Horoscopes and Other Diversions by Dan Borengasser, a journalist, playwright, and author of Whiskers’ Pond (Pacific Greetings, 2008), a novel about frogs. Both works list Hart as editor.
8 I’m cannibalizing another footnote from my novel history, in this instance the huge one on pp. 580–81 of volume 1. See p. 183n69 of the same volume for examples of novels in the form of dictionaries and encyclopedias.
9 Hart surely had assistance with the format and language of the disposition from her husband Jake Hart, a lawyer and federal magistrate judge. In 2009, SpringStreet Books published his novel The Tooth Fairy, about labor–management relations.
Steven Moore is the author of the two-volume survey The Novel: An Alternative History. This essay, along with his two previous ones for Socrates on the Beach, will appear in his forthcoming book, Last Time Around: Essays, Reviews, Interviews (Zerogram Press).
