Mulcahy Conway Associates

The Painted Bridge

This beautifully written historical novel is gripping from the outset, as we feel the heroine's confusion, rage and terror when her husband arranges her brutal imprisonment in an asylum.

Set around 1860, as superstitions collide with a new scientific understanding, THE PAINTED BRIDGE is a powerful story of a woman's self-discovery, and the search for the truth in a world where the line between madness and sanity seems ever finer. Anna Palmer, young wife of Reverend George Palmer, is newly incarcerated at Lake House, a private asylum near London. She is convinced she will be released as soon as she is able to talk to the physicians. She has no doubts about her sanity.

Querios Abse, director of the Lake House asylum, is under pressure to make ends meet while looking after the disturbed women in his care. He would like to modernise the brutal treatment of mental disease, but beset with his own family's troubles too, he finds it no easy task.

Lucas St Clair is one of the specialists who visit him with new techniques for treating mentally ill patients. St Clair is under the belief that the new invention of photography will allow him to see from the human face whether the mind is lucid or mad. He directs his experiments towards Anna.

Locked in her room, Anna begins to experience visions that have been part of her imagination since childhood. She also carries a letter that seems toreveal a scandalous reason for her husband wanting her put away. Making a friend of Abse's young daughter Catherine, they hatch a plan to escape. But as intrigues worsen at Lake House, their path is fraught with challenge and tragedy before past wrongs can be righted.

The reader feels indignant seeing Anna Palmer's desperate vulnerability in the Victorian era, when a wife's legal right to freedom was at her husband's whim.

Other books by this author

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  Daughter Of Dust

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