Why a Booktrail?
1880s onwards: A journey through the imagination
Saving Lucia
What you need to know before your trail
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.
Travel Guide
A journey through history…reimagined
This is the story of three remarkable women reimagined in an unusual and quirky story. All three women were shoved away from society into asylums. This was easy to do in those days and was used by men as a way of getting some women out of the way who they thought were too independent and single-minded for the time.
Lucia Joyce, daughter of the famous James Joyce, is in an asylum. It’s in this unusual setting that she meets Lady Violet Gibson. Violet has been put in this place as she has tried to shoot Mussolini, intending to kill him. She didn’t manage it however.
The third women is Blanche Wittman. She was the pivotal figure in André Brouillet’s painting Une leçon clinique à La
Salpêtrière (A clinical lesson at La Salpêtrière).
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Saving Lucia
Destination/location: Northampton Author/guide: Anna Vaught Departure Time: 1880s
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