We were sent Saving Lucia by Bluemoose Books as part of their #bluemoosewomenin2020 campaign. Anna is a writer, editor, teacher, volunteer, campaigner and mom (just about everything then). Saving Lucia is her third novel.
Saving Lucia – the blurb
How would it be if four lunatics went on a tremendous adventure, reshaping their pasts and futures as they went, including killing Mussolini? What if one of those people were a fascinating, forgotten aristocratic assassin and the others a fellow life co-patient, James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, another the first psychoanalysis patient, known to history simply as ‘Anna O,’ and finally 19th Century Paris’s Queen of the Hysterics, Blanche Wittmann? That would be extraordinary, wouldn’t it? How would it all be possible? Because, as the assassin Lady Violet Gibson would tell you, those who are confined have the very best imaginations.
I shot Mussolini
To talk about Saving Lucia you must first talk about the fascinating back story behind the tale. Lady Violet Gibson did actually shoot Mussolini in 1926. She was committed to the psychiatric hospital St Andrews (still Britain’s largest). Lucia Joyce, our narrator was the daughter of author James Joyce. She too was committed to St Andrews. Marie ‘Blanche’ Wittmann was known as the Queen of Hysterics. She was used to demonstrate the effects of hypnosis by Charcot, one of the most famous doctors in the World. Anna O (Bertha Pappenheim) was a patient of Breuer dubbed the ‘grandfather of psychoanalisis’. She featured in his book Studies in Hysteria that was co-written by none other than Sigmund Freud. These are real women. They lived fascinating lives amongst fascinating people. And in Saving Lucia, Vaught puts them all together with imaginative results.
What if
Vaught takes us on a journey with these four women casting a fevered mind over what might have happened, what could have happened. The prose is erratic in nature, like that of a muddled mind which adds to the asylum setting. Whilst hard going at first, it does settle down somewhat at around page 50. The book is brief at 200 pages and I easily finished it in a few days. There are so many re-ocurring themes in the book: religion, birds (passerines), friendship and of course, women and madness. Alternative realities are offered, yet the reader is always reminded ‘did all of this really happen?’ Because who knows what really happens in the mind of a mad person? It was a delight to read about the real life characters and a book that you leave frantically researching who was who and what was what.
Thanks
My thanks go to Bluemoose for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review. The book will be published next month and really is worth a read.