I am hosting The Coffee Pot Book Club virtual tour again, for A Feigned Madness by Tonya Mitchell. I have to admit, this book sounds really dramatic and the cover is gorgeous! Check out the blurb and read a thrilling excerpt!
The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out. —Nellie Bly
Elizabeth Cochrane has a secret.
She isn’t the madwoman with amnesia the doctors and inmates at Blackwell’s Asylum think she is.
In truth, she’s working undercover for the New York World. When the managing editor refuses to hire her because she’s a woman, Elizabeth strikes a deal: in exchange for a job, she’ll impersonate a lunatic to expose a local asylum’s abuses.
When she arrives at the asylum, Elizabeth realizes she must make a decision—is she there merely to bear witness, or to intervene on behalf of the abused inmates? Can she interfere without blowing her cover? As the superintendent of the asylum grows increasingly suspicious, Elizabeth knows her scheme—and her dream of becoming a journalist in New York—is in jeopardy.
A Feigned Madness is a meticulously researched, fictionalized account of the woman who would come to be known as daredevil reporter Nellie Bly. At a time of cutthroat journalism, when newspapers battled for readers at any cost, Bly emerged as one of the first to break through the gender barrier—a woman who would, through her daring exploits, forge a trail for women fighting for their place in the world.
Ten days. A little more than a week. I could do it. I had to.
A few minutes later, the nurses returned, and soon we were moving again, the ferry lurching and bringing forth more fetid odors from the sea. Just beyond the charity hospital, a long brick structure came into view. This castle-like beast, with its crenellations and towers, was the penitentiary. So vast were its wings that it seemed an age before it disappeared from view. For the next several minutes, there was only wild brush and trees with brief glimpses of lower buildings beyond: the men and women’s almshouses, most likely, where the disabled or those otherwise unable to work were housed. Then, suddenly, another large building loomed, longer even than the penitentiary: the workhouse, a place where, it was said, thousands of men were incarcerated for petty crimes, living out shorter sentences than those housed within the penitentiary.
With each new sighting, my dread grew, dread that manifested itself as an ever-tightening knot in my stomach. My companions exchanged wary glances, and then they, all of them, looked at me. What did they expect me to do? Give them an encouraging smile? I, the woman who had lied her way to Blackwell’s? I had not come to make friends. Their situations were no concern of mine. I had come to observe, to fool everyone for the sake of a job. It was as simple as that.
My last glimpse out the window before we docked was of a distant circular tower partially obscured by trees. As we neared the shore, however, it was eclipsed by other trees and scrub along the beach. I felt the ferry slow. We had reached our destination . . .
Buy this Book
Amazon UK • Amazon US
Tonya Mitchell
Ever since reading Jane Eyre in high school, Tonya Mitchell has been drawn to dark stories of the gothic variety. Her influences include Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker. More contemporarily, she loves the work of Agatha Christie, Margaret Atwood, and Laura Purcell. When she landed on a story about a woman who feigned insanity in order to go undercover in an insane asylum, she knew she’d landed on something she was meant to write. Her short fiction has appeared in, among other publications, Glimmer and Other Stories and Poems, for which she won the Cinnamon Press award in fiction. She is a self-professed Anglophile and is obsessed with all things relating to the Victorian period. She is a member of the Historical Novel Society North America and resides in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband and three wildly energetic sons. A Feigned Madness is her first novel.
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