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by Jennifer Higgie
The strange and tortured mind of the Victorian artist and patricide Richard Dadd, a painter of fairies who spent most of his life in psychiatric hospitals
Jennifer Higgie presents a year in the life of Richard Dadd, infamous inmate of one of England's most notorious sanitariums, London's Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam.
A young man of great promise, Dadd embarks on a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The two men travel through German forests, Alexandrian brothels and across the desert to the Nile. By the time they find themselves beneath the unforgiving sun of Syria and Palestine, Dadd's fraught mind has been taxed to the limit with extraordinary images. He becomes stranger and more violent, changes his companion attributes to sunstroke. But in Dadd's imagination he has become a devotee of the god Osiris. Shortly after his return to England in 1843, the god directs him to take a life, and Dadd is set on the road to Bedlam.
At once jarringly acute and alarmingly askew, Dadd's voice is rendered with both empathy and acuity by Higgie. This is a poetic and considered portrait of an artist, as well as an intriguing mystery about how, and why, a mind can go so swiftly and dangerously awry.
Told in short chapters, the story culminates in an act of violence that confirms Dadd's descent into lunacy. It's an arresting meditation on the fragility of sanity." —Publishers Weekly(starred review)
"Higgie's sumptuous biographical novel covers the time that English artist Richard Dadd spent confined in a sanatorium…a haunting literary novel about a painter's mental decline." —Foreword Reviews
This information about Bedlam 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.
Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. Her recent books include The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World and The Mirror & The Palette: Rebellion, Revolution & Resistance, 500 Years of Women's Self Portraits. She is also the author and illustrator of the children's book There's Not One; the editor of The Artist's Joke; and the host of the podcasts Bow Down: Women in Art History and Artist's Artists.
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