It is safe to say that historical fiction is my favourite literary genre by some distance. Perhaps it’s for the very fact that they are based on elements of truth and woven around actual events, and therefore leave the reader not only entertained but also informed.
Madwoman, written by Louisa Treger and received from Jonathan Ball Publishers, is another such instance of fictional threads spun around true events, on this occasion centred on the life of the world's first female investigative journalist, one Nellie Bly.
Born Elizabeth Cochran, she grows up in 1870s Pennsylvania under the protective wing and tutelage of her father, a judge, who encourages little Elizabeth to form her own opinions and to believe that she can become whatever she wants, despite being a woman. He trains her to gather information for his cases and she learns from an early age to ask pertinent questions.
At the age of twenty, Elizabeth reads an editorial in the Pittsburgh newspaper that would set in motion the course of her career. The piece in question is an attack on working women, which infuriates Elizabeth and compels her to write a retort to the editor. Elizabeth’s passion, eloquence and considered reasoning impress the editor, who offers her a foot in the door under the pen name of Nellie Bly. She becomes aware of the power of her pen, and soon learns how to wield it in the defence of working women, the poor and other downtrodden groups.
Her reporting takes her to slums where she encounters entire families dwelling in single rooms, deprived of privacy and dignity; children being put to work virtually before they can walk; and a litany of other injustices. When her controversial articles threaten to upset the applecart, she is forced to relocate from Pittsburgh to New York – the nation’s publishing capital – in order to pursue a career in investigative journalism.
But New York, as Nellie Bly soon comes to realise, is no picnic. After months of failed attempts at landing a job at any of the city’s exclusively-male newspapers, she grows increasingly desperate. So desperate, in fact, that she comes up with the perilous idea of faking insanity in order to be committed to the notorious Blackwell’s Island women’s lunatic asylum to report on the poor conditions and grievous abuse of patients there.
Despite the very real possibility of dying there herself, Nelly knows that this assignment might be her only shot at breaking into the man’s world that is investigative journalism.
One can only imagine the mettle and nerve it must have taken for her to go so far down this road. But when the doors of Blackwell’s shut behind her, Nelly has no choice but to switch to survival mode in a place that is fraught with almost unthinkable mistreatment of patients by staff, and mental abuse that could drive a sane person into insanity. Treger’s descriptions of the conditions these women (many of whom were wrongly committed) were subjected to are nothing less than toe-curling and I’ll admit I struggled through much of it.
Nevertheless, Madwoman is a testament to Treger’s adroitness at developing and fleshing out characters, this time affording the reader an intimate peek at the real Nellie Bly and the various motivations and catalysts that shaped her life and career.
Treger takes the reader on a nail-biting journey on which Nellie’s mindboggling courage and willpower are stretched to the limits as she is faced with the horrors in the asylum but also her own demons.
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