Rosalind (UK) / The English Chemist (US)
Rosalind takes up the now familiar cudgels and, using the mass of proven evidence available to her, reprises Rosalind Franklin’s whole sad story – and it was, and still is, a sad story.
There is, and always has been, plenty of evidence that the group of scientists, Watson, Crick and Wilkins, alongside whom Franklin worked, blatantly plundered her research and that when the facts of the two-chain helical structure of DNA were proved and published, removed from Franklin the credit that was due to her for this historic discovery. It is regrettable that as the facts eventually became obvious, the Nobel Institute, because of its rule against posthumous awards, failed, and is still failing, to right this injustice.
Poor Rosalind. Was it because women were at that time still sidelined in ways that fortunately no longer prevail? Was it because she was Jewish? Or, as Jessica Mills suggests in her version of things, was it due to her rather chilly, unresponsive personality?
In Rosalind, Jessica Mills gives us a character who is a detached individual who fails to react warmly with her fellows. This personality quirk does not excuse their treatment of her, but it may, in part, explain it.
Had Franklin survived the cancer that cruelly killed her at an early age, she might have been able to establish a healthier relationship with her colleagues or fought her corner and won for herself the recognition and its rewards to which she was clearly entitled.
Has Jessica Mills succeeded in adding anything to Franklin’s story? I find this novel unsatisfactory and confusing, in that it seems to be caught between the two stools of biography and autobiography, switching between Franklin’s voice and Jessica Mills’s interpretation of her subject’s personality.
