SAVING LUCIA

Anna Vaught

From Shelf: My Bluemoose Collection

Lady Gibson shot Mussolini in 1926 & was sent to a mental hospital. Lucia Joyce, daughter of James was a fellow inmate. It is a novel inspired by some of the most interesting women in the history of psychiatry whose identities were shaped by the rhetoric's of men, giving voice to individuals whose screams and whispers can no longer be heard.

How would it be if four lunatics went on a tremendous adventure, reshaping their pasts and futures as they went, including killing Mussolini? What if one of those people were a fascinating, forgotten aristocratic assassin and the others a fellow life co-patient, James Joyce's daughter Lucia, another the first psychoanalysis patient, known to history simply as 'Anna O,' and finally 19th Century Paris's Queen of the Hysterics, Blanche Wittmann? That would be extraordinary, wouldn't it? How would it all be possible? Because, as the assassin Lady Violet Gibson would tell you, those who are confined have the very best imaginations.