
All Men of Genius by Lev AC Rosen
All Men of Genius (2011) by Lev AC Rosen takes Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and, um, “twins” them with the steampunk genre to offer up a mostly entertaining tale of dual identities, proto-feminism, the art of invention, and the complexities of love. It’s light-hearted good fun and generally succeeds.
If you know the above plays, the plot and the names will be mostly familiar, though they’ve obviously been tweaked to varying amounts: Viola from Twelfth Night becomes Violet here, the perambulator from Wilde’s plot is a bit unique, and the “Duke” is actually the headmaster of Illyria College, famed for its geniuses, none of which have been women as they are prohibited from applying. But faster than you can say “costume change,” we’re quickly thrust into the b... Read More