Madwoman: Nellie Bly

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Oh, and I loved loved loved the ending so much, it felt just right considering the character’s ambitions and growth! By this time in the novel I was championing Nelly so strongly, I almost had a placard in my hands and felt like standing on a box in the middle of Roosevelt island to tell the world what she was doing and why.

Her dream of a career in law lies in tatters, her mother’s second marriage is a disaster but all these experiences will shape her character and her future. She grew up in Pennsylvania in 1870s and had a father who was strong and encouraged her to read, follow politics and be educated.Taking the pen-name Nellie Bly she gets in and has no idea of the horrors she is about to experience. In this compelling tribute to a fearless young reporter of Victorian New York, Treger brings to vivid life the way one woman's broken past gives her the strength to expose the many horrors faced by others left to rot in an asylum. While the subject matter is worth reading, the presentation lacked for me, especially in the first half of the book. I’ve always been interested in the life of Nellie Bly, so I was really looking forward to reading this fictionalised (but very close to what actually happened) account of her 10-day incarceration in a lunatic asylum.

Characters speak in a way no real people would have, with educated and noneducated, native speakers and emigrants all sounding the same. But I liked the way that it was structured, it spent enough time on Bly’s childhood to show us how she became a reporter but not too much where it got boring. childhood after her beloved father dies leaving his second wife Nellie's mother bereft and almost penniless.There are some truly chilling moments, there were times I felt quite emotional and I found myself incredibly invested in Nellie’s life and later on the circumstances she and her fellow patients found themselves in at the asylum. Louisa Trager has crafted a mesmerising and novel full of evocative imagery and prose that made me see and feel everything that was on the page as vividly as if I were experiencing it myself. Nellie feared that the newspaper would forget to release her, and the grim conditions she experienced were driving her mad. My only dislike was the romantic part of the novel which I found hard to believe, but it was not that important to the overall story and its message. In 1887, young Nellie Bly sets out for New York and a career in journalism, determined to make her way as a serious reporter, whatever that may take.

Determined to become a journalist in a male-dominated world Nellie tries to make a name for herself exposing deplorable conditions of working women in Pittsburgh, but in doing so angers the (male) business owners who threaten to pull their advertising from the newspaper if her articles continue. An extraordinary portrait of a woman way ahead of her time, Madwoman is the story of a quest for the truth that changed the world. Although it started a bit slow for me, sifting through Nellie’s (nicknamed Pink) childhood and family struggles, this was a fascinating and propulsive story.She wrote harsh but true articles and then moves to New York where she feels she can really start writing about the hard stuff. It's a fascinating story which resists any temptation to sensationalise, treating all the inmates of Blackwell's Island with sympathy and humanity and bringing these people - who really lived, a century and half ago, and, many of them, died, in that place - back to life to speak to us. Her ambition is at best tolerated, at worst seen as unfeminine, wrong, in some sense, bound to lead to trouble and perhaps indicative of an unsound mind.