When a book refuses to shy away from squalor and brutality while venerating the passionate and beautiful, it is always a memorable experience ... Joining this list of haunting novels is Elizabeth Macneal’s unapologetically lush debut, The Doll Factory, which will doubtless prove as much of an obsession for its readers as the art model Iris Whittle is to the men around her ... Macneal’s immersive epic stays firmly rooted in historical fact, inviting comparison to Erik Larson and The Devil in the White City ... Macneal is clearly engrossed in the Pre-Raphaelite movement and especially in the plight of women who were churned through the gristmill of poverty and spat out again. There is hardly an aspect of Victorian London that she has not mastered ... People who scoff at Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre may belittle The Doll Factory, with its strong whiff of fairy-tale romanticism. Ignore them. Iris is a dreamer, and dreamers are inherently romantic.

The final chapters of Elizabeth Macneal’s delightfully creepy novel kept me screwed to my office chair ... What more could one want from a Victorian thriller? But Macneal delivers even more. The Doll Factory, which is already a hit in England, offers an eerily lifelike re-creation of 1850s London laced with a smart feminist critique of Western aesthetics. It’s a perfect blend of froth and substance, a guilty pleasure wrapped around a provocative history lesson ... Macneal deftly paints her fictional heroine into the colorful lives of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ... They strut through these pages radiating all their brash brilliance, fragile enthusiasms and comic eccentricities (including their fondness for wombats) ... This exuberant re-creation of London is fascinating, but it wasn’t Macneal’s feminist critique of the Pre-Raphaelites’ aesthetics that almost made me miss a flight to California. Credit for that goes to a taxidermist named Silas, whose story slithers along underneath the tale of Iris’s liberation.

Novels set in the Victorian era are routinely described as 'Dickensian'. Few of them warrant the adjective. However, in its evocation of the seething energy of 1850s London, its immersion in the detail of the 19th-century city’s everyday life and in its fascination with the macabre and the eccentric, Elizabeth Macneal’s debut novel does feel genuinely Dickensian. Add a keen exploration of the restrictions that were placed on women and the possessiveness of men, and you get a remarkable example of historical fiction ... Macneal charts her heroine’s quest to escape her confinements, metaphorical and actual, by the men who admire her in a story full of life, colour and intelligence.

...both a page-turning thriller and a thoughtful, moving exploration of what it meant to be a woman and an artist in the 19th century ... Perfectly paced and richly atmospheric, Doll Factory is an incredibly assured debut novel. Writing about visual art isn’t always easy to do well, but Macneal writes about her real and fictional artists and their work so evocatively that the reader not only sees the vivid colours in their palettes, but understands their importance to the pre-Raphaelites ... Iris has her own distinct, original artistic vision, and throughout the novel Macneal explores, with sensitivity and insight, how a woman can develop that vision and be truly seen as an individual in a world where her opportunities are curtailed ... I literally couldn’t put it down for the final breathtakingly tense 70 pages. The Doll Factory is emotionally and intellectually engaging with an utterly gripping plot. In a word that the pre-Raphaelites would appreciate, it’s a stunner.

Macneal has a magpie’s eye for whatever is bright and glittering, and she writes vividly, employing the present tense more deftly and with more vivacity than is usual—that’s to say, it doesn’t, as so often, prevent the narrative from moving briskly. Her characters may be the stock figures of pastiche Victorian fiction, but she contrives to animate them sufficiently to make them pleasing. The narrative is nicely orchestrated – so much so that improbabilities are easily accepted. For the book is in its way a thriller too, certainly a crime novel, even if the denouement falls short of being surprising ... It has its faults, but they are the faults of youthful enthusiasm; the faults of a young writer suddenly discovering her power and taking pleasure in exhibiting it ... It’s accomplished; there’s nothing raw about it ... But is it about anything that matters? Perhaps we shall have to wait for a second or even a third novel before knowing whether the author’s evident ability can carry her beyond charm so that she deals with matters of significance, writing something which has the reader engaged in both feeling and thought

After reading a few pages of this book, the first from Edinburgh-born Elizabeth Macneal, I concluded the title and cover were the central elements of a conspiracy. They had worked together to perform an act of deception by creating certain expectations that were quickly, filthily and uncompromisingly dispelled ... worthy of comment is the discipline with which Macneal maintains an authentic mode of reference – every literary touch is matched to the novel’s setting. And it’s disgusting! The book froths with horrible food, putrid smells, dirty people and rotting animals ... Everywhere, innocence is spoiled. One scene, involving baby mice, almost had my eyes running about on the table. With most of the book’s weight in my left hand, I wanted to be able to read faster, not so it was finished but so I could reach the end. Macneal makes it so Iris’s fate is uncertain until almost the last page and, given the darkness of the whole, no easy presumptions can be made. But I knew I was making my way through the final pages of a memorable book.

Macneal is a talented writer and this is a frankly moreish novel ... Macneal refreshingly portrays Iris as neither saintly nor wilful (the usual options open to heroines of historical fiction). Instead, she resembles a modern woman in her desire to exceed expectations for her life without abandoning those she loves and must, to an extent, leave behind ... Macneal’s London is vividly rendered: all rosy nipples, beads of blood from cracking the backs of fleas, and strawberries pickled in sugar ... reading this novel is a little like gorging on sweets. The Doll Factory is a page-turner, make no mistake, but this is a rare instance when readers might have preferred the writer to slow down. Macneal writes wonderfully pithy descriptions but they are occasionally not given enough bandwidth, sacrificed to a fairly breathless plot. Some of the characterisation is a little overripe and the last third of the book suffers from Iris having her agency somewhat blunted. But these seem like peevish quibbles when the prose is this captivating and the story is so engrossing

Chapters interweave like the finest lace ... London’s splendor as well as its squalor come alive in visceral detail, and Macneal’s attention to artists’ processes spans the extremes from ecstatic joy to macabre revenge and everything in between. The Doll Factory isn’t just inspired by the Victorian era; it takes Thackeray’s social satire and Rodin’s natural forms and molds them into a stunning portrait of a modern heroine.

Talented debut novelist Macneal drops readers right into a Victorian London that’s home to stinking squalor and chaos, but also significant beauty and possibility. Midway through, readers won’t know if they’re holding a romance, tragedy, or murder mystery, but won’t pause long enough to wonder about it ... This terrifically exciting, chiaroscuro novel became an instant bestseller in England, with TV rights already sold, and will jolt, thrill, and bewitch U.S. readers, too.