Mad Women

Every life has many rooms. Some keep us safe, some leave us changed. There are parts of us in each of them … For some who have experienced madness the door to that state remains a threat, but I am grateful to those writers I love who have felt their way out of it, to allow light into the mysteriously jumbled realm…

Mad Women is a stunningly woven tapestry of seven lives and six extraordinary novels.

In this luminous and deeply compassionate blend of literary biography and memoir, Sheena Joughin explores the lives and novels of six renowned women writers - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Janet Frame, Sylvia Plath, Antonia White, Anna Kavan and Virginia Woolf. She delves into the times in which they lost themselves in breakdown, but found a way to come back, to produce art that shimmers and endures, and put their broken parts into a whole. Each put their own experience of extreme states into their fiction and in doing so wrote novels that continue to captivate and console.

Woven in-between the writers’ rich stories are times in Sheena’s own life when she has lived with, and through, extreme experiences that have transformed her understanding and appreciation of all that madness is and of the creative catalyst it can be.

Mad Women is a work of astute insight and profound empathy, a book of solace and shared stories that offers a startling new perspective.