The storyline for The Mad Women's Ball was inspired by actual events in the Salpetriere Asylum in Paris, where the patients were all women who had been deemed mad or hysterical.
During the latter part of the nineteenth century a celebrated neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, was famous for his work on female hysteria, and he presented a program of lectures to large numbers of fellow physicians where patients suffering from seizures were used as live demonstrations. The women would be hypnotised to encourage seizures on demand, and one or two of the patients became famous as a result of it.
The patients in the hospital were commonly referred to as madwomen, and some had genuine reason to be there, but others found themselves locked up by their families if they became difficult to manage for any reason. Every year the Asylum held a ball and invited the citizens of Paris to come in and observe the patients who were dressed in colourful costume for the event. The ball was well attended as the privileged people were filled with morbid curiosity and wanted to see the mad women for themselves.
The heroine of the story, Eugenie, is forced into the Asylum by her father after she confesses to seeing visions of her dead grandfather and develops an interest in the spirit world. Spiritualism is a running theme throughout the book and picks up on the writings of Allan Kardec who was a controversial figure at the time.
This is a debut novel that was originally written in French, but unless you were told, you would never notice either. It is fairly short, at just over two hundred pages, and draws the reader in from the start so it is not surprising that it became a best seller.
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