Critics' Opinion:
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Published Jul 2012
304 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
An elegant, emotionally suspenseful debut, The Painted Bridge is a story of family betrayals, illicit power, and a woman sent to an asylum against her will in Victorian England.
Just outside London, behind a high stone wall, lies Lake House, a private asylum for genteel women of a delicate nature. In the winter of 1859, Anna Palmer becomes its newest patient. To Anna's dismay, her new husband has declared her in need of treatment and brought her to this shabby asylum.
Confused and angry, Anna sets out to prove her sanity, but with her husband and doctors unwilling to listen, her freedom will not be won easily. As the weeks pass, she finds other allies: a visiting physician who believes the new medium of photography may reveal the state of a patient's mind; a longtime patient named Talitha Batt who seems, to Anna's surprise, to be as sane as she is; and the proprietor's bookish daughter, who also yearns to escape.
Yet the longer Anna remains at Lake House, the more she realizes that - like the ethereal bridge over the asylum's lake - nothing and no one is quite as it appears. Not her fellow patients, her husband, her family - not even herself.
Locked alone in her room, driven by the cruel treatments of the time into the recesses of her own mind, she may discover the answers and the freedom she seeks… or how thin the line between madness and sanity truly is.
"Wallace masterfully creates an atmosphere of utter claustrophobia and dread, intermingled with the ever-present horror of the reality of women's minimal rights in the 19th century." - Publishers Weekly
"Melodrama that borders on over-ripeness but that can be quite delicious." - Kirkus Reviews
"I was gripped by this fantastic book. Chilling, heart-warming, very well written and researched, this is an unusual novel about Victorian England." -Rosie Boycott, author of A Nice Girl Like Me and Our Farm
"The Painted Bridge is something special: an intriguing and disturbing tale of the reality of women's lives behind the veil of Victorian respectability, which will have resonance today. Beautifully written and evoked." -Rachel Hore, bestselling author of A Gathering Storm
This information about The Painted Bridge was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Wendy Wallace is an award-winning freelance journalist, short story writer, and author of two nonfiction books. She is a former senior features writer for the Times Educational Supplement and in 2001 she was named Education Journalist of the Year. Her journalism has appeared in The Telegraph, The Guardian, and The Scotsman. She lives in London. Visit her online at www.wendywallace.co.uk.
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