Novel gives voice to untold stories of four women silenced by history

It is a sad but true fact that the stories of many remarkable women seem to have been erased from history. Or their narratives are related through the prism of male activity and success.
new work: Author Anna Vaught, whose novel Saving Lucia was published by Bluemoose Books last month.new work: Author Anna Vaught, whose novel Saving Lucia was published by Bluemoose Books last month.
new work: Author Anna Vaught, whose novel Saving Lucia was published by Bluemoose Books last month.

If those women are also deemed to be ‘lunatics’, then the likelihood of their stories being told diminishes further. Author Anna Vaught explores the stories of four such women, real-life historical figures, in her new novel Saving Lucia, published last month by Hebden Bridge-based independent publisher Bluemoose Books. Vaught says that she was partly prompted to write the book after seeing a photograph.

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“It was of an elderly woman who was covered in birds and was feeding them out of her hand, it was such an arresting image. When I read more about who she was – an Anglo-Irish aristocrat called Lady Violet Gibson and that she had tried to kill Mussolini in 1926 – I thought ‘there is a story there.’” A

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fter doing further research, Vaught discovered that the photograph had been taken in the grounds of a psychiatric institution – St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton – where, following the assassination attempt, Gibson had been incarcerated for the rest of her life.

Another patient at the same hospital was Lucia Joyce, daughter of the great Irish novelist James Joyce. She was committed to the institution by her family in 1951, overlapping with Gibson’s stay for a period of five years.

There is no historical evidence to suggest that the two women knew each other, but it was the starting point for Vaught’s hugely engaging novel, which imagines their conversations as Lucia becomes Violet’s scribe, telling the older woman’s story and thereby, as the novel’s title suggests, saving herself at the same time.

“The biggest stimulus for writing the book is that I am interested in writing about mental health which is partly because I have a long history of mental health issues myself,” explains Vaught. “And I’m also interested in how we use writing, reading and imagination in order to cope with difficulty and to release our minds. That theme is present throughout the book.”

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The second half of the novel, in particular, enlarges on this as Violet and Lucia ‘escape’ in a surreal flight of fancy, taking in the stories of two other similarly forgotten women along the way. These are Blanche Wittman, the so-called ‘Queen of the Hysterics’, a patient of 19th century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot known for his work on hypnosis and hysteria and ‘Anna O’ (real name Bertha Pappenheim), a patient of distinguished Austrian physician Josef Breuer and his protégé Sigmund Freud. The work they did with her as a case study led to the development of the ‘talking cure’, laying the foundations of modern psychoanalysis.

“There is very little information about Blanche or Bertha, who was a prominent Jewish social worker, and intermittently ill,” says Vaught. “She did important work in her own right, but it was all destroyed by the Nazis. I wanted to give all four of these women a voice. I hope I have done them proud.”

Saving Lucia by Anna Vaught, £8.99, published by Bluemoose Books bluemoosebooks.com

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