Madwoman: Nellie Bly

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Mental health reform and destigmatization is a huge passion for me, so I really should’ve already read up on this a while ago.

Inspired by her father Pink plans to eschew marriage and pursue a career in law, but his untimely death when she is fourteen curtails her ambition. The audio itself is deftly performed by Laurel Lefkow, who reflects Bly's newspaper vocation, giving the text just a hint of one of the big stories being read out from that day's paper.

There are hints of scandal in an institution - the asylum on "Blackwell's Island" in New York - and an intrepid investigative journalist sets out to penetrate the establishment and expose the truth. We are told through the perspective of Nellie of the ways that men abuse their social standing to punish women. I fairly leapt at the chance to read Louise Treger’s fictionalised narrative of Elizabeth Cochran who wrote under the pseudonym of Nellie Bly, having always been fascinated by her remarkable story.

There is at this time much prejudice against femalejournalists especially those who wish to tackle more difficult subjects than fashion and beauty.

Feeling she has gone insane herself, Nellie really starts to question her assignment and agreement to do this. It's a moving, absorbing, and beautifully written story, and a terrifying portrait of the fate many women suffered in the late nineteenth century. While Nellie is a woman to admire, nothing about this book caused it to stand out and the ending definitely felt too abrupt. The daughter of a judge, ‘Pink’ as she was nicknamed by her family, was encouraged to be curious and learn about a range of subjects, including those generally thought to be unsuitable for women at the time. A place where those charged with looking after the patients either give inadequate care or delight in doling out the most cruel and inhumane treatments they can think of.

Louisa Treger takes us deep inside the mind of an extraordinary woman, whose ambition to succeed in a male world leads her to the very brink of madness. In New York, she convinced a leading newspaper publisher to allow her to go undercover by faking insanity and be confined to the notorious Blackwell insane asylum to report on the horrific conditions therein. Down to her last dime and desperate to prove her worth, she comes up with a dangerous plan: to fake insanity and have herself committed to the asylum on Blackwell's Island.

I realise this is a fictional retelling but you can tell Nelly is one of those women in history that really does need her story to be told. Louisa Treger’s impressive Madwoman describes the extraordinary bravery of 19th-century journalist Nellie Bly, who wrote a blistering exposé of the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island, “a human rat trap” in which she intentionally got herself incarcerated. It takes her to slums where whole families do everything in one room, deprived of privacy and dignity.