Ooooh, the blurb for this book just sounds so delicious, that in 1882 a woman wakes up in a lunatic asylum and initially can't recall anything about the last six weeks of her life, she then remembers she is Georgina Ferrars but finds out that someone else of that name is living at her address!
Ooooh, the blurb for this book just sounds so delicious, that in 1882 a woman wakes up in a lunatic asylum and initially can’t recall anything about the last six weeks of her life, she then remembers she is Georgina Ferrars but finds out that someone else of that name is living at her address!
Georgina grew up living with her mother, Emily Ferrars, and her Aunt Vida on the Isle of Wight, with her father having died when she was young. After her mother and aunt died, Georgina went to live with her Uncle Josiah in London. Now, and she doesn’t know how, she has ended up at an asylum, which is in the grounds of a stately home owned by the Mordaunt family. The doctor in charge of the asylum is Dr Straker and he addresses Georgina as Lucy Ashton and doesn’t believe her claim that she is actually Georgina. She begins to wonder if she has been placed there as some kind of experiment in order for them to watch and study her while she loses her mind and slowly disbelieves her own identity. Ooooh, it’s very dramatic and a bit scary!
Georgina then finds her journal, with some letters her mother had received from her cousin Rosina. The letters detail Rosina’s restricted life with her stern controlling father and her planned escape with Felix Mordaunt. Georgina’s journal reveals to her that she had advertised for information about Rosina, and that a lady called Lucia Ardent replied and visited Georgina as she had once overheard her mother mention Rosina’s name but Lucia said that she knew nothing more than that. Georgina and Lucia had then wondered if Lucia’s mother was Rosina and that she had taken an assumed name after she was abandoned by Felix. Oooh, so Rosina eloped with Felix Mordaunt and this stately home/asylum is owned by the Mordaunt family, so there is obviously a connection here! I can’t leave this book alone, every time I try and put it down I have to pick it up again as it is so grippingly written, plus there aren’t really chapters as such so there is no convenient place for me to leave off reading and put the book down!
Georgina further learns from her journal that she had discovered that Rosina was made pregnant by Felix and their child was herself, Georgina. However, Felix had previously got Rosina’s sister Clarissa pregnant and their child was Lucia. Rosina had left Felix when she learnt of this but Felix altered his will in Rosina’s favour, so although Felix’s brother Edmund claimed that the stately home/asylum and the family’s wealth was his inheritance when Felix died, it all really belongs to Georgina, due to her being Rosina and Felix’s daughter but also due to her being Emily’s ‘ward’ as in her will Rosina had left her assets to her cousin Emily (who Georgina had believed was her mother). Meanwhile Clarissa (sister of Rosina and mother of Lucia) was blackmailing Edmund threatening to reveal that the inheritance wasn’t his, and Edmund had shared all this with Dr Straker. Clarissa and her daughter Lucia had then decided to take Georgina’s identity in order to gain the inheritance themselves. Phew, this is all quite complicated, I’ve had to re-read quite a bit of this just to get it straight in my mind, mostly because the book is so exciting that I am racing through it so I must slow down and concentrate on the details more!
Georgina sees in her journal that when she had originally learnt all this, she had decided to visit the asylum in order to discover more information from Edmund, but she was met there by Dr Straker and when she explained everything to him he wasn’t willing to give up the asylum that Edmund lets him run so he wiped Georgina’s memory using an electric device he’d made to try and cure mental illness, but which had proved fatal to two patients. However, Dr Straker then needed Georgina to remember everything so she could reveal where she’d hidden her journal as this contains the full details of her history and the location of the will which states her rights to the inheritance, so he can destroy this evidence and the will, and he then planned to wipe Georgina’s memory again and have her live as Lucy Ashton. Meanwhile, Lucia turns up at the asylum as she is also hoping to get hold of the journal and will, and Dr Straker tries to kill Lucia to prevent her from doing this and to stop the blackmail of Edmund, but he was stopped in time.
Wow, what a dramatic and gripping book, though I did feel like it was perhaps a little over-complicated, but perhaps that was just me not grasping things (due to my inability to stop racing through the book to see what happened!). And it’s horrifying to consider that women did used to be imprisoned in lunatic asylums back in Victorian times, their husbands or fathers wanting to remove them for some reason, and how powerless they were with no trial or chance of justice or escape, and also how cruel the treatments could be too then, shiver, shiver, it’s just awful to think of. But I did love reading this book and how gripping it was, I will definitely read more of this author’s work, and his books The Seance (set in Victorian time again, which I love) and The Ghost Writer (featuring a librarian and a novelist, both of which I love!) sound wonderful! And The Asylum inevitably reminded me of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith too, with a woman being concealed under a false identity in a lunatic asylum, so I will enjoy re-reading those books again.
