The American women Bremer met inspired her novel, Hertha, which was published in 1856. Its main character, a Swedish feminist, lobbies for women’s financial independence and education. The novel was a bombshell: Bremer was popular enough abroad that it was published in Swedish and English at the same time, and it took the debate about feminism mainstream.

Patrick may have ended her career in obscurity, but her Gill-man went on to become a horror movie icon “that was immediately and forever associated with the 1950s,” writes Steve Kronenberg in Universal Terrors. Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro became obsessed with the Gill-man after he saw the movie as a boy. “I would draw the Creature riding on a double bicycle with Julie Adams [the film’s bathing beauty] having an ice cream, a triple-cone ice cream,” del Toro said in an NPR interview..