Bedlam - by Jennifer Higgie (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The strange and tortured mind of the Victorian artist and patricide Richard Dadd, a painter of fairies who spent most of his life in psychiatric hospitals

Jennifer Higgie presents a year in the life of Rich­ard Dadd, infamous inmate of one of England's most notorious sanitariums, London's Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam.

A young man of great promise, Dadd embarks on a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The two men travel through German forests, Alexan­drian brothels and across the desert to the Nile. By the time they find themselves beneath the unforgiving sun of Syria and Palestine, Dadd's fraught mind has been taxed to the limit with extraordinary images. He becomes stranger and more violent, changes his companion attributes to sunstroke. But in Dadd's imagination he has become a devotee of the god Osiris. Shortly after his return to England in 1843, the god directs him to take a life, and Dadd is set on the road to Bedlam.

At once jarringly acute and alarmingly askew, Dadd's voice is rendered with both empathy and acuity by Higgie. This is a poetic and consid­ered portrait of an artist, as well as an intriguing mystery about how, and why, a mind can go so swiftly and dangerously awry.

Review Quotes

"Higgie's prose is fragmentary yet lucid, and the novel evokes the inextricable beauty and terror of Dadd's sensory journey, while raising some of the philosophical questions it poses about art, language and other minds. Bedlam is a mystery story in which we search for clues as to how an individual might go from precocious talent to parricide."
--TLS

"Part of the joy of reading Bedlam, despite its uncomfortable material, is that it was born from the author's genuine love and curiosity--it comes from an open-minded critic's impulse to truly understand the artist and his art...This reissue by Verso, twenty years later, is a welcome second chance to introduce readers to both a fascinating 19th-century artist and an extraordinary art critic. In many ways, Bedlam is exactly what a first novel ought to be--puckish, bold, and unrestrained, an experiment in free-writing that few authors allow themselves."
--Kismet

"Higgie returns with a poetic novel that tenderly embodies the voice of Victorian-era painter Richard Dadd, who is now remembered primarily for the tragic details of his life and institutionalization. Higgie threads the needle of his complex legacy with the compassion so often denied to historical figures whose struggles with mental health were criminalized and reduced to "lunacy." The "art novel" genre is undoubtedly making the rounds in publishing right now, but by bringing Dadd's interiority back to life, this one promises to challenge and move us in equal measure."
--12 Art Books to Kick Off Summer, Hyperallergic

"Higgie captivates in this poetic story of English artist Richard Dadd and his descent into madness...An arresting meditation on the fragility of sanity."
--starred review, Publishers Weekly

"Higgie's sumptuous biographical novel covers the time that English artist Richard Dadd spent confined in a sanatorium...a haunting literary novel about a painter's mental decline."
--Foreword Reviews

"The Other Side lit up my brain. A radical, fascinating exploration of art and the otherworldly, Higgie is an expert and erudite guide in this brilliant reclamation of female artists."
--Katy Hessel, author of The Story of Art Without Men

"Higgie chronicles with an illuminance that welds her readers to the page"
--Katie Ebbitt, The Violet Book

"Elegantly expanded my thinking on the eternal mystery of where art comes from."
--Sinéad Gleeson

"To render another's inner life this vibrantly is a remarkable feat. To render the raw, tangled, fierce inner life of painter Richard Dadd with such stunning immediacy and imagination is a feat of brilliance. Utterly absorbing and entrancing, Bedlam reads as one long prose poem that ushers you into landscapes real and imagined, with all the senses ablaze."
--Chloe Aridjis, author of The Shadow of the Object

"Luminous and unsettling. A beautifully written meditation on that derangement of the senses that links creativity to madness, capturing all of the associated danger and excitement. Higgie writes like a painter, with an extraordinary attention to light and an intimate understanding of how worlds can be constructed (and torn apart) with the barest of gestures."
--Ben Eastham, author of The Imaginary Museum

"In a time where both the arts and mental health services are under threat and actively being dismantled, Higgie's book takes on renewed relevance as a sensitive take on how exactly a tender open mind can take a wrong turn."
--Jemima Skala, AnOther Magazine

"[Higgie] captures the odd cast of Dadd's mind with great subtlety and power ...[her] novel is admirably restrained, conveying sympathy for Dadd without dulling or seeking to explain the terrifying chaos of his thoughts."
--Chris Power, Observer

"The portrayal of Dadd and the peregrinations of his mind is accomplished with a simple elegance which never veers into pretension... Higgie's portrait exhibits skill and verisimilitude, and it led me to further exploration of its subject and the art he created."
--Historical Novel Society

"Disturbing, brilliant ... Higgie documents [Dadd's] descent into madness with great power and authenticity."
--Diana Darke, Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. Her recent books include The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World and The Mirror & The Palette: Rebellion, Revolution & Resistance, 500 Years of Women's Self Portraits. She is also the author and illustrator of the children's book There's Not One; the editor of The Artist's Joke; and the host of the podcasts Bow Down: Women in Art History and Artist's Artists.