Mad Women

Every life has many doors and any novel that tells of breakdown must draw us through to unexpected places; places of fear, intensity and muddled thought, but also of what feels to me - in retrospect - like a sort of shimmering that vibrates on through the rest of life when the experience is over.

Mad Women is a stunningly-woven tapestry of seven lives and six extraordinary novels.

It may not be essential to have had a breakdown in order to write about one, but the six women whose work and lives are celebrated within these pages did all endure periods of great instability. They each put their own experience of extreme states into fiction and in doing so, wrote novels that continue to captivate and console.

In this luminous and deeply compassionate blend of literary biography and memoir, Sheena Joughin explores the novels of six renowned women writers - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Janet Frame, Sylvia Plath, Antonia White, Anna Kavan and Virginia Woolf. She delves into the times in which they lost themselves in breakdown, but found a way to come back, to produce art that shimmers and endures, and put their broken parts into a whole.

Woven in-between are stories of the times in Sheena's own life when she has lived with, and through, extreme states: experiences of breakdown that have transformed her understanding and appreciation of all that madness is and of the creative catalyst it can be.

Mad Women is a work of astute insight and profound empathy, a book of solace and shared stories that offers a startling new perspective.