The Nature of Monsters

The Nature of Monsters is a novel by the English writer Clare Clark, published in 2007. It is set in London in 1718, and much of it takes place in an apothecary's house where the line between medicine and something else is not clearly drawn. It is a novel about what people will do in the name of finding something out, and about a young woman who has very little power over what happens to her.

Eliza Tally is fifteen and headstrong when she falls into an affair in the parish she comes from, and when her lover casts her off and denies the union she is left with nothing to stay for. She travels to London, a city that attracts and frightens her in equal measure, and finds work in the house of the apothecary Grayson Black.

She trusts him to repair what is left of her reputation, and the household she has entered is more interested in what it can find out than in her welfare. The novel is concerned with the appetites and obsessions of the people around her, and with the questions that the science of the time was asking.