ABSTRACT
This chapter is an analysis of Imogen Hermes Gowar’s 2018 novel The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock describing the sexual underworld in the Georgian period in the convention of magic realism. It argues that the novel restores the themes and conventions that were pushed to the outskirts of the novelistic tradition to depict the predicament of women in an increasingly commercialised society, to provide a critical commentary on the artifice of natural, social and literary distinctions, and to shed light on the formation of the novel in the eighteenth century.
