"Grey Dog" by Elliott Gish — Review by Stephanie Trott
Grey Dog by Elliott Gish
by Stephanie Trott
Everyone remembers their first literary mad woman. For many, it involved wedding dresses and obsessive handwashing, rooms with yellow wallpaper, an inviting body of water. Others may recall the poisons of Merricat and Esther Greenwood, the desperate cries of Blanche DuBois, the scratchings of Susanna Kaysen. And for some, their first mad woman will be Ada Byrd, the narrator of Elliott Gish’s debut novel Grey Dog (ECW Press, 2024).
At the turn of the twentieth century, Ada is a schoolteacher and budding naturalist eager to escape her shadowed past. From a connection made by her father, she accepts a teaching post for the new school year in Lowry Bridge, an isolated town with an idyllic community of people whose identities have all been shaped by loss. Ada’s hosts live in the more developed side of town and are puritanical in everything from their work ethic to their household interactions. Though the townspeople are welcoming to Ada, their hospitality is more cordial than warm. Ada is eventually haunted by bizarre natural events that she realizes are imagined. “Is it some disorder of the mind that causes me to see things, hear things, that then vanish as though they never were?” she wonders. “As a rational woman, I can think of no other explanation. Madness, or something like it, must be the only scientific way to account for these monstrous visions.”
From the beginning of diaristic novel, Gish’s prose invites the reader to merge with Ada’s mind and her recollection of her days, doubts, and reflections of this strange little community. Ada additionally places some of her confidences in the Widow Kinsley, a dark and ominous figure who lives in the woods and is initially perceived as a villain. She exudes confidence, self-acceptance, and independence, all traits Ada lacks and is therefore drawn to. “Every town needs its witch, doesn’t it?” she asks Ada in one of their first meetings. “Someone to whisper about in the dark?”
There is a sense of lustful attraction between the two women, who each possesses something the other wants. For Ada, it is the absence of men and the creature comforts of home, of plush velvet chairs and iced buns, a statue of Athena on the mantelpiece. For the Widow Kinsley, it is innocence, passion, and the youthful drive to find where one belongs in the world. While Ada longs for companionship, she also longs for the life of entitled solitude that the Widow Kinsley lives and freely addresses:
“I have often thought that spinsterhood combines the worst of childhood and womanhood—all the helplessness of the former and all the duties of the latter. Widowhood, on the other hand, has much to recommend it. A widow may do as she pleases, for she wears the respectable cloak of marriage about her shoulders still, and yet, she has no one to fetter her independence or dictate the company she keeps. If all women could be widows without marrying first, I think that there would be not a single woman in the world who would choose a living husband over a dead one.”
Narratively, Gish reflects familiar themes found within the mad woman archetype, echoing struggles often depicted in Anglophone literature. The isolation Ada experiences in Lowry Bridge along with her eventual detachment from reality echoes the more extreme experiences of characters like Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or the unnamed narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, both exemplifying the classic portrayal of the confined, oppressed woman who slowly unravels. Similarly, Ada’s growing paranoia, akin to Dickens’s Miss Havisham or Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, serves as something of a literary easter egg to suggest she is among their ranks and further reinforces her alignment within this trope.
Like all of these fictional women, Ada’s life has been impacted by traumas. Gish invites the reader to determine what may have been the narrator’s first wound: Was it the abuse she and her sister, Florrie, suffered at the hands of their father, who stole the little treasures they found in nature and closed the sisters in an under-stairs cupboard for a full day and night? Was it her sister’s death, perceived to be at the hands of a husband who threw his pregnant wife down the stairs and blamed her fatality and that of their child on Florrie’s clumsiness? Or might it have been Ada’s rape and the resulting affair with a former host, one that maimed Ada’s reputation and sent her home to deliver a stillborn child under the uncaring eye of her father?
At the onset of winter, Ada’s gradual transition into sanity becomes more apparent as she recounts these inflictions in her diary and looks to condemn herself for them. In reality, she has done nothing save for being herself. In the incident under the stairs, Ada and Florrie each blame themselves for their shared fate before wrapping themselves “together like twins in the womb . . . curled up like mice in a nest.” For how long have women blamed themselves for their own mistreatment, justifying the harm done to them as something they could have prevented had they pretended to be someone else? And how could this character, so harmed at the hands of men, not have come to seek the comfort and company of women? The male gaze so often ruins women’s ability to see themselves clearly, and Gish predictably writes into this with how Ada sees her own reality. Ada’s inclination to shoulder blame for her mistreatment is also an early indicator of her descent into madness—and echoes her struggle with self-worth, doubt, and internalized misogyny.
Through Ada’s memories of men, Gish shows how the gradual erosion of one’s agency increases one’s vulnerability and inclination to cave toward others’ expectations.
Buried deep within this schoolteacher’s secrets is her affection for her rapist’s wife and her adoration for the reverend’s wife, Agatha. Ada’s canonical queerness is nonthreatening and largely born of curiosity; she acknowledges her attraction to these women only within the pages of her diary, noting her longing alongside her fear of feminine touch. Her words come to feel like rereading one’s own journal at times, particularly for the queer reader who has lived in similar quietudes of shame and denial. Remembering an interaction with the woman she had previously admired, Ada wonders, “What if she were to reach out to me? What if she were to lay her hand upon my throat, my cheek, my breast? What might happen then? What could?”
There are no overt displays of sexuality in Grey Dog, with queerness in particular but a hushed few entries in the narrator’s diary. Such mentions are never overt but rather subtle and always in retrospect. Dialogue is recollected by Ada’s steel-trap memory, arguably to a fault, as few can remember every detail of every part of their day, let alone every word said to them within it. Ada’s wildest encounter occurs at a harvest celebration, wherein Agatha confides that her husband nearly forbade her to attend. “I had to promise him three times that I would not dance with another man before he would let me out of the house,” Agatha says. Ada’s response, and the resulting merriment, are pleasantly predictable: “Would the Reverend object to you dancing with someone who was not a man?”
Ada’s queerness adds a layer of complexity, complicating the traditional portrayal of mad women solely as victims of male oppression. By centering this, Gish highlights the resilience and agency of queer people and challenges the continued marginalization of such voices. Ada’s sexuality, however quiet, becomes a source of strength and empowerment guiding her toward a truer self and disrupting the heterocentric narratives of Lowry Bridge. By portraying Ada’s queerness as an integral part of her character rather than a mere plot device or subplot, Gish shows that queerness is not presented as a source of conflict or tragedy but as a facet of identity that can enrich characters and contribute to their growth.
Perhaps representing the closet so many of us once occupied, Gish’s choice to contain Grey Dog entirely within Ada’s diary allows both novel and diary to serve as subversive sanctuary. Gish flexes poetic, permitting Ada to expound on the beauty of an owl skull or the warmth of a winter’s hearth, the simplicity of walking alone through nature—life’s simplest pleasures. The lines are often stream-of-consciousness, flowing and wandering but always coming back to themselves through Ada’s description of her school lessons, observations, and memories. Gish pushes the boundary between diary entry and traditional prose with Ada’s recollection of interactions she has with others in town, often filled with details about their homes and bodies or intimate conversations. This form creates a sense of immediacy, authenticity, and trust in the narrator while also allowing for a nonlinear storytelling approach, as Ada recounts both events and personal reflections in the order they occur to her rather than adhering to a traditional chronological structure.
Ada intricately navigates her desires amidst the constraints of a conservative community, vividly illustrating Adrienne Rich’s concept of lesbian existence as a form of resistance against compulsory heterosexuality. Through the intimate pages of her diary, Ada quietly and unknowingly rebels against the societal pressures that seek to confine her identity. Her relationships with other women—particularly the dynamics with Agatha and the Widow Kinsley—serve as poignant parallels to the untamed natural world juxtaposed against the structured community of Lowry Bridge. In these relationships, Ada discovers profound connections that transcend the boundaries of societal expectations, allowing her to find both solace and subconscious affirmation. Though Ada never speaks aloud of her attractions to any other characters and only recounts them to herself by pen, she embodies the transformative power of lesbian existence by challenging, dismantling, and reshaping the world around her.
Gish’s choice to write in the epistolary form does not come without inherent limitations. The novel is a quick and enjoyable read, one that is easy to pause and resume in part thanks to shorter chapters with clear arcs and a sense of resolution. While the first-person limited voice certainly offers readers intimate access to the narrator’s innermost thoughts and feelings, the narrative is confined to Ada’s perspective, with others’ always and only seen through her own. This does invite the reader, though, to determine where Ada’s mind begins to fray—or if she’s even mad to begin with. However, this perspective causes Grey Dog to sputter in its final pages where so much of the plot depends on dialogue. As the pace increases to a frenzied recollection, the reader is left less engrossed in the events unfolding and more curious as to where Ada is at the time of her diary entry’s penning. We do not have a sense of why it is important to her that she chronicle her final moments in Lowry Bridge or why committing her experience to the page is more critical than simply living a carnal, unbridled life. If she is truly to become an unreliable narrator, one who hears her name on the wind and gives in to the delicious raunch of decay, should the reader believe that what they’re reading accurately reflects her reality? Or perhaps Elliott Gish is one step beyond us all, subtly guiding us toward accepting the veracity each of us embodies in how we view ourselves and the world around us, acknowledging that we are at our core just lone animals, some softer than others, looking to be loved.