Mad Women

Adventures in Chaos and Consolation

In Mad Women Sheena Joughin brilliantly and empathetically explores books by six renowned women writers: Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper), Janet Frame (Owls do Cry), Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar), Antonia White (Frost in May and its sequels), Anna Kavan and Virginia Woolf (through the prism of Mrs Dalloway) and the periods of madness in their lives that their novels grew out of.

Woven between these literary biographies are stories of the times in Sheena’s own life when she has lived in ‘extreme states’ of breakdown and madness, and of her own reckoning with living ‘a life that had something in it that I could not ever tell anyone’.

As one of six children, born to a fragile and self-involved mother and a loving but distant father, Sheena's childhood room has been a place she has never been able to fully escape. But it has also transformed her understanding and appreciation of all that madness is, and of the creative catalyst it can be.

This is not a misery memoir. It is a stunningly woven tapestry that weaves together seven lives and celebrates six extraordinary novels. It is a story of women writers who 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.

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