Historical fiction with a strong female lead? The fictionalisation of a real-life journalistic sensation? Victorian-era New York? All of these things are exactly what brought me to this book – and I loved it!
Thanks to the author for providing me a copy for review. As always, opinions are my own.
The year is 1887 and Nellie Bly is pushing against the conventions of the era that allow her brothers more freedom than her. When tragedy and scandal strike her family, Nelly starts out on a road to a journalistic career – and a sensational news story for which she will risk her life.
The focus for the book is Nellie’s decision to get herself committed to an asylum on Blackwell’s Island in order to write an undercover news story on conditions there. This will be the story that makes her career – or destroys her mental and physical health. The time she spends in the asylum make for harrowing reading and Treger cleverly builds the tension as Nellie’s sense of madness and sanity start to shift – to the point that she wonders if she will be allowed to leave.
I’d heard Nellie Bly’s name before I read this, although I had no idea of the extent of what she went through in her life. Treger has done a brilliant job of mixing historical fact with vividly imagined fiction – her Nellie Bly reads as a real woman, unconventional and groundbreaking as she undoubtedly was. To help the reader, there’s an interesting Biographical Afterword at the end to separate the fact from fiction – the real Nellie Bly was quite a woman too!
This is a very well-researched and well-told story. The reader gets caught up in Nellie’s story, and those of the women around her in the asylum whose futures do not seem as glittering as Nellie’s acclaimed journalistic career. There’s a lot of tragedy in the asylum – sad back-stories, terrible conditions, abuse, poor outcomes for the female patients – and this makes the book an emotional read at times.
The book provides plenty of food for thought regarding women’s lives in history. The fact that ‘hysterical’ women could be detained indefinitely by men in such asylums in this era is well known, but Treger presents the human face of this – a selection of women with (or even often without) mental health issues who are degraded and dehumanised by their incarceration. It’s genuinely shocking and makes for some uncomfortable but important reading.
I’d recommend this to anyone who enjoys thoroughly-researched and engaging historical fiction – especially books with a strong, unconventional female at their heart. This will take you all the way to 1880s New York – and inside the gates of a truly grim asylum – in a book that delivers lessons on female strength and autonomy, medical mismanagement of women and the driving force for social change.
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Header photo by Everyday basics on Unsplash.
