Tag: Reviews

About the Book

To marry is madness. To escape is impossible.

In 1886, a respectable young woman must acquire a husband. Violet Pring’s scheming mother has secured a desirable marriage proposal from an eligible Brighton gentleman. But Violet does not want to marry. She longs to be a professional artist and live on her own terms.

Violet’s family believes she is deranged and deluded, so she is locked away in Hillwood Grange against her will. In her new cage, Violet faces an even greater challenge: she must escape the clutches of a sinister and formidable doctor and set herself free.

Format: ebook (381 pages)                  Publisher: HQ
Publication date: 8th December 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

The Darlings of the Asylum joins the list of historical novels I’ve read in which young women are prevented from pursuing their chosen career, displaying their talents or exercising any independence over their lives by the expectations of family or society. In this case, Violet Pring’s ambition is to become a professional artist. Actually, ambition isn’t quite the right word. Violet’s need to express herself and unleash her vivid imagination is part of her psyche. It’s the thing she lives for and when engaged in drawing or painting she can often lose herself for hours on end in a kind of artistic frenzy. And her paintings, full of sexual imagery, are certainly not the sort of thing genteel ladies of that time are expected to produce. 

What Violet definitely doesn’t want is to marry as her mother, in particular, is anxious for her to do. Violet fears that, if she does, even to someone as seemingly understanding as her friend Felix, creating art will be viewed as nothing more than a pastime to be fitted in between tedious domestic duties and meaningless social calls. Violet is encouraged in her artistic ambitions by her art tutor, Miss Fanshaw, a woman who has managed to carve out the sort of independent life for herself Violet would like to emulate, and by rakish artist, Wilf Lilley, who praises Violet’s unconventional, unrestrained style of painting.

When Violet’s artistic impulses are frustrated, her extreme reaction, as well as the nature of her paintings, sees her diagnosed with ‘moral insanity’ and committed to Hillwood Grange Lunatic Asylum (known to the inmates as Hellwood). There she is exposed to the malevolent ministrations of the utterly hateful Dr. Harold Rastrick, a man who displays a perverted misogyny, is a believer in eugenics and carries out foul experiments on a group of female inmates, the ‘darlings’ of the book’s title. At one point, he even ponders the use of vivisection ‘if done humanely’. He is an absolute monster, representing in an extreme way the sort of vile attitudes towards people with mental conditions, learning difficulties and physical disabilities in this period. In fact, these attitudes persisted into the 20th century as we know only too well. Indeed some might argue they still do. As a person with epilepsy (thankfully controlled through medication) it was particularly shocking to see epileptics included in the category of ‘incurables’, ‘freaks of nature’ and ‘imbeciles’. 

I confess that for some time I struggled to empathise with Violet although of course I was appalled by the treatment she, and others, receive at the hands of Dr. Rastrick.  Violet’s unwavering focus on achieving her own desires means she fails to appreciate until quite late in the book the harm she has unwittingly caused. And although I could understand her desire for freedom, that didn’t mean I felt comfortable about the way she achieves it. However, what I did think was clever is how Violet’s artistic talent enables her to create portraits of her fellow inmates that reflect their individual characters and their humanity, in stark contrast to the ‘identikit’ photographs taken by Dr. Rastrick in which the women resemble ‘ghosts of themselves’.

The Darlings of the Asylum is rich in atmosphere and there’s a real Gothic flavour to the depiction of Hillwood Grange. It’s a dark tale of obsession and the desire for self-expression.  

I received an advance review copy courtesy of HQ via NetGalley.

In three words: Atmospheric, intense, disquieting

Try something similar: The Deception of Harriet Fleet by Helen Scarlett

About the Author

Noel O’Reilly was a student on the New Writing South Advanced writing course. He has worked as a journalist and editor at the international business media company RBI, and is now a freelance writer. His first novel is Wrecker and The Darlings of the Asylum is his second. He lives in Sheffield.

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