Death of a Unicorn

Reading Group Discussion Questions

by Jenny Terpsichore Abeles

In what ways is this story a classic “whodunit”? How does it surprise the reader’s expectations of the mystery genré?

“Death of a Unicorn” is the image of the puzzle B. gives the young Mabs to kill time while he is away. Which character is best correlated with the unicorn and why? How do themes and images associated with unicorn myths connect to themes and images of the novel? When and how does the “puzzle” come to be completed?

The narrator of this novel is herself a writer, a young and dazzling journalist in the first half of the book, and a successful, middle-aged romance writer in the second half, the older voice often interrupting the younger one in the form of footnotes. How does her writerly voice change over the course of her career? Her self-image and self-representation? What features or traits bridge the two periods of her life?

Explain your reactions to the central romance—referred to at one point as “the bargain”—in this book between Mabs and B. How do their roles, lifestyle, and feelings for each other surprise or confirm your notions of romance and relationships? Inasmuch as this is a love story, what kind of love story is it?

Mabs is a twin. How does she feel about her twinned status? Where else in the novel does the doppelganger or replication motif emerge, and how do these iterations reflect upon Mabs’ situation and identity?

About midway through the novel (82), B tells Mabs, “We are who we are by the accident of a moment.” To what extent does this prove true, in the book and experience more generally?

When Mabs first sees B, her reaction is, “It was a frog prince.” How apt is this impression? In what ways is he “princely” and in what ways “froggy”? How does he stand up to our notions of a romantic leading man? What other fairy tale images or elements are at work in the novel?

What does Mabs’ experience at Night and Day reveal about the magazine business and society in early 20th-century London? What are the concerns of the journalists there? How does Dickinson’s depiction of this milieu jive with our ideas about journalism today?

In a footnote, the older Mabs reflects upon the difficulties of writers “to bring the odour of period to life,” lamenting that most people’s “real sense of their time is as unrecapturable as the momentary pose of a child” (17). How do the language, behaviors, conventions, and assumptions of the characters, as well as static details such as details of clothing and decor, evoke the two periods in which this story is set? What was happening culturally and politically in England in the early 1950s and the early 1980s that might color the circumstances of Mabs’ story?

What attitudes toward race, gender, and class are at work in this novel?

Mabs makes frequent references to the “piggy” features she shares with Jane. How are ideas of female beauty and attractiveness presented, subverted, or confirmed in this novel? How does Mabs regard her own value as a woman? What kind of woman is she and how would she fare in our own “post-feminist” time?

There is much talk of the mixed blessings of inheritances, particularly in regard to the two estates B and Mabs stand to inherit. Together with the houses, what does an inheritance consist of as Mabs considers it? How do the possibilities or inevitabilities of these inheritances affect the action of the story?