Saving Lucia by Anna Vaught
I would like to thank the author and Blue Moose Books for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for affair and honest review
Publisher – Blue Moose Books
Published – Out Now
Price - £15.00 Hardback £9.99 Paperback
The Hon. Violet Gibson shot Mussolini in 1926 and spent the rest of her days in a Mental Hospital. A fellow ‘patient’ was Lucia Joyce, daughter of James. It is a novel inspired by some of the most interesting women in the history of psychiatry, Blanche , Queen of the hysterics in Paris and Annie O, one of Freud's patients, their identities have been denuded, shaped by the rhetoric’s of men, quick to deem these women 'lunatics', giving voice to individuals whose screams and whispers can no longer be heard.
I think a lot of us are seeing changes in our mental health at the moment. The stresses that 2020 are heaping on us added to our unusual confinement is creating an exceedingly difficult environment for us to navigate through. Part of the joy of reading is the reader bringing their own experiences to the story merging it with the author’s words. When I read Saving Lucia by Anna Vaught I was not expecting to so clearly be given an insight into the dark history of mental illness and the people the great men of history have felt to be too insignificant to mention. But I ended up reading one of my favourite stories of the year.
The story begins in 1956 within St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton and focuses on two of its real life inhabitants who would have shared the hospital at the time – the Honourable Violet Albina Gibson now has been effectively sectioned for thirty years for attempting to shoot Mussolini in 1926; and Lucia Joyce (daughter of the author James Joyce) who was institutionalised in the mid -1930’s after a number of mental health episodes. The elderly Violet and Lucia have become friends and Lucia has effectively taken the role of chronicling what is increasingly looking to be Violet’s final days. But Violet is not simply counting the days until her death; she wants to give Lucia her insights; share her knowledge of the women who have been imprisoned and used for the study of madness and just perhaps hope that there is an escape. On a Tuesday night through unknown means they are joined by two women from the past. The ‘Queen of the Hysterics’ Blanche who was exhibited in 19th century France by a famous physician studying the abnormalities of the brain and made famous in paintings; plus the enigmatic Anna O (real name Bertha)who was used as case study by Breuer and then Freud to progress the case for psychiatry. These women will tell their true stories to each other; try to discover the cause of their confinements and ultimately see if they can escape the various fates that history gave them.
This was a stunning read. Its theme is the women who are hidden because they are felt too strange; unexplainable or embarrassing and all of them have some famous man in their past who seems to have eclipsed their lives in the shadow of his greatness. The women that the male doctors of the time just did not understand. Vaught deftly weaves in a novella length tale four amazing lives of women, who until I had read this book, I had never heard of while the men in their lives are still talked and written about today. Vaught gives these women a voice and makes the reader actually see them not their conditions– they are not historical footnotes or a case study but an actual human being. Vaught does not try and say these women were not mentally ill, but she posits that the way they were treated as children; by their doctors; years of confinement or their family actually worsened their mental health. It is a chilling fact that Blanche reminds us her Parisian asylum in its history contained over eight thousand souls condemned for madness, poverty and perhaps just possibly because they were women who disobeyed. By the end of Vaught’s tale, we see them as people who history has been less than kind to and we want them to find finally a way out of their dark places.
That itself was a huge accomplishment but then I also fell hard for Vaught’s writing. Intriguingly through the real life crossing of Lucia and Violet Vaught cleverly makes the muse for Finnegan’s Wake to actually be an a writer herself (and in reality her work was burned by her family) – this allows Vaught to create what at first appears manic stream of consciousness but as we get used to the rhythm of the words becomes a almost poetical journey into these women’s lives. Initially this feels almost overpowering as we run through sentences and repeating motif; but importantly this is giving us a insight into Lucia’s state at the time and the story progresses the more Violet herself enters the tale and we get a counterbalance of a smart, upper class woman who has studied history and news but suffered greatly even before her brush with the Italian fascist. The choice and rhythm of the words creates loops and echoes of themes within the women’s tales – highlighting how strangely similar their lives were despite living decades apart. Vaught creates scenes where characters see their past selves; imagine breaks for freedom or see the horrors that awaited them in the future. There is a sobering thoughts as to what may have happened if Violet has managed to curtail Fascism in the twenties ahead of the darker days that we know lie in wait – and we discover even more hidden women that history ignored and the men of the time just happily consigned as mad. Violet herself asks the reader is she is mad for deciding to kill a fascist dictator what exactly is Mussolini and why did history and people like Churchill instead applaud his actions and rate him sane?
This was an interesting time to read a tale about confinement and mental health, but I actually found it an enlightening, thoughtful and powerful read. Vaught shines an overdue light on the women the great men of the times found to be problematic; are let down by the limitations of mental health understanding and provision and most importantly makes the reader see them not as medical or historical curiosities but people in their own right who have lost far more than those of us is self-imposed isolation are having to out up. Easily one of my favourites reads this year and a hugely impressive achievement.
