A fascinating read. This is the story of Nelly Bly, one of the first female American journalists and how she feigned madness to get herself admitted to a mental asylum in NYC. For 10 days she endured horrible treatment and witnessed the same of the many women there as well. Upon her release, she wrote articles for it for "The World" newspaper. She was also an advocate for orphaned children and worked endlessly for their cause her entire lifetime.

The story is told chapter to chapter from her point of view during those times as a young woman trying to break into a man only job field, to her period in the asylum and what came after. The alternating chapters were the point of view of her assistant Beatrice later in Nellie's life as she was writing the whole truth of her time in the asylum until the end of her life.

A terrific read! ( )

Based on a true story about a pioneering female journalist, told in the format of a dual timeline set in 1887 and 1921. Elizabeth Cochrane, aka Nellie Bly, desperate for a job on a newspaper, impersonates an insane woman in order to infiltrate Blackwell Island’s Asylum in New York and report back on care and conditions. Some thirty years later she is living in a hotel, running an adoption agency, with Beatrice Alexander as her secretary. Beatrice is given a manuscript to type up which revisits Nellie’s experiences in the asylum and this gives Beatrice a great insight into Nellie’s psyche.

I’d heard of Nellie Bly but didn’t really know anything about her, so I found this book extremely interesting and also fascinating and compelling. It seems very well researched and conveys a realistic and shocking interpretation of life in an asylum during the Victorian era. It’s horrifying to think that some people were committed to such places just because they were a little confused or had fallen on hard times, they weren’t insane at all. It’s beautifully and vividly written. I think the author has done a fantastic job of filling in the gaps and elaborating on grey areas. The story isn’t always dark - Beatrice gives the tale a little lightness with her budding romance with Ernest Coulter, an employee of the Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Children, fictional though it may be!

If you enjoy fiction based on lesser known characters in history, you couldn’t do better than read this book. I thoroughly enjoyed it and can highly recommend it. ( )