Mary Beth Keane on why she re-imagined Typhoid Mary’s life

She was also labelled “the most dangerous woman in America”, after some wealthy New Yorkers for whom she cooked contracted typhoid fever. Though she didn’t suffer from it herself, she carried – and transmitted – the disease.

Dr George Soper, a bacteriologist and medical investigator, grew suspicious when he learned that a disease traditionally linked to the poor was afflicting the rich. He identified Mallon as the common denominator – though the first time he confronted her she chased him out of her employer’s kitchen. Eventually he prevailed, however, and had her put into quarantine. She was released after several years – with the proviso that she never cook again.

Mallon, however, disobeyed, and was found in the kitchen of a Manhattan maternity hospital. She was returned to quarantine, where she spent the remaining 23 years of her life.

Mary Beth Keane came across Mallon’s story in 2006, while writing her first novel, The Walking People. She began writing her new novel, Fever, which looks at events from Mallon’s point of view, two years later.

Keane acknowledges an affinity with her subject: like Mallon, her parents emigrated to the United States from the west of Ireland. “It’s why I felt I knew her, right off the bat. She came as an immigrant into the servant class, as they called it then, and my parents are firmly working class, as we call it now. Everything I read about Mary, in the beginning, was written by someone who I thought couldn’t possibly understand her experience as an uneducated person new to New York City. They were doctors, lawyers, the educated elite who had many generations in the US. She was being interpreted by people who couldn’t really understand her point of view – and largely by men. That got my back up. It’s not that she was a victim, but I felt she deserved a point of view.”

Mallon’s complicated nature drew Keane in. “She got in her own way throughout her life. Her battle was between herself and the doctors, and was very much a class battle. She suspected them of keeping her there because they could do their experiments on her in a way they wouldn’t have done if she was a society woman. And that was written off as the insane ramblings of a person who didn’t understand the harm she was doing. But when I looked at it objectively, she wasn’t wrong. They got their longitudinal data about being a typhoid carrier by testing her throughout her life.

“It didn’t help that she seemed to have no respect for the social mores of the time. She really did go after Soper with a roasting knife and fork! That’s what makes me love her! Supposedly she had a filthy mouth, which I also love.”

There are more accounts written by the upper classes than the other way around, and that proved another spur to Keane’s imagination. “The lady of the house would talk about long-term servants whom she adored and who became part of the family. I thought, ‘Bullshit, that’s your perspective.’ When any wealthy person hires someone they say ‘Oh but she’s part of the family,’ – but only until you stop paying her. Actually for her this is a job, and for you it’s something else. I’m not one hundred per cent sure that I would have acted any differently than Mary. You get so furious and fed up, and no one you speak to seems to understand what in the world you’re talking about.”

When Mallon was first released from quarantine the authorities found her a job in a laundry but, as Keane points out, a cook’s wages were three times those of a laundress, so she went back to her old job. Surely that sealed her fate? Keate agrees. “If she were any less complicated I wouldn’t have wanted to to write about her. But if it was justice to put her into quarantined isolation, then it was justice that was very unevenly applied.” For Mallon wasn’t the only carrier, some were men who were never interred nor barred from plying their trade – even if it involved food – because they were deemed to be heads of households. Just three deaths can be definitely attributed to Mallon, whereas they were responsible for a great many more. “If Mary had infected an entire block of tenements in Little Italy, and everybody died, she still wouldn’t have been in the trouble she was in. It was only because she infected the wrong people.”

Authors usually have a question in mind when they set off. Did Keane write Fever to figure out why Mary insisted on working as a cook? “I think it’s not a fiction writer’s job to answer the question, just to stir the pot. It’s like entering the party from a different door. It gives me the creeps that book clubs that I visit sometimes ask me, ‘What’s the moral of this story?’ I don’t know that there is one, or that I’m ever looking for one. It’s a story. And if we feel a little implicated in it, all the better.”

Parallels with the present day are impossible to ignore. “In the US,” says Keane, “they took a nationwide poll in the early 1980s about whether people who were HIV positive, or had Aids, should be tattooed as a warming. I think a majority said ‘Yes.’ There was a resurgence of interest in Mary’s story then, because there were all these insane propositions around about how to cope. It comes up now, too, with drug-resistant forms of Tuberculosis. Everybody forgets, nobody gets a disease on purpose, so how do you become a criminal because you’ve contracted something?”

• Fever by Mary Beth Keane is published by Simon & Schuster, priced £12.99