Hmmm, not sure it's my thing. I loathed The Favourite, and didn't see The Lobster. It all looks a bit... frenetic for me.

Dunno....
I'd need a backstory to understand it most likely.

So the book came out at the end of the Thatcher era. A Victorian doctor is reanimating dead things as Victorian doctors were wont to do. He finds drown pregnant woman and brings her back to life with the brain of the daughter she was carrying. An adult woman he can make over in his own image.

He plans for her to marry another doctor, his protégée. As she develops she decides to run off with a bounder and cad. They tour the world and she destroys him. She returns to marry the doctor.

A complete shit of a British colonel shows up and claims she is his wife who disappeared while pregnant a number of years earlier. She tells him to get bent.

This is all written after the fact by a third doctor who knew the others. The next part is written by the woman much later in the 1920s. She calls bullshit on the stories told by the men and reveals her own story.

The husband was lazy and kind of a wanker. She went on to become a doctor herself and championed access to abortion, care for all regardless of means, and sexual health and diversity.

It is kind of a commentary on how wins against patriarchy have to be fought over and over.

Huh, interesting summary, arse_hat...thanks.