I bought The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell in a book fair for peanuts (I'm not ashamed of my purchasing criteria...). What a great bargain! I would never have thought it would prove to be such a good book, and how I would not only enjoy reading it, but thinking about it and about the plot in particular. You see, I'm always interested in the background work that goes into a book. I can almost always tell whether an author has carried out serious research for it, which means that this is a subject of interest. I'm the scholarly type, so obviously I went and researched myself afterwards...
The point in question: how easy it was up to the early 20th century to have a woman committed to a psychiatric institution.
"A man used to be able to admit his daughter or wife to an asylum with just a signature from a GP"
